The Myth of Denominational Demise

Posted on December 29, 2011 | 21 comments

The world is filled with certainties that aren’t – like the myth that religious denominations are dead. We will eventually have three inchoate pools of people, it is said: Orthodox, “Other,” and Unaffiliated. Already Orthodoxy is less a denomination than a way of life rooted in halakhic observance, community consciousness, and synagogue centrality. “Other,” presumably, will feature the very opposite, synagogues as “limited liability communities” that collect dues in exchange for rabbis on call, life-cycle ceremonies, and occasional events like High Holidays. The growth market will be “a pox on both your houses” — the unaffiliated altogether.

Evidence for this sorry denouement includes the documented decline in religious affiliation generally, the generational replacement of the baby boomers (who joined things) with their children (who don’t); economic conditions that allow little luxury for supporting synagogue movements; an internet era that provides programming for free; the declining numbers of Conservative Jews, once the majority denomination; and the stagnation of Reform Jews who maintain their numbers only because of the in-migration of Jews by choice.

So why are denominations not necessarily on their way out?

Denominational obituaries assume that organized religion in general is a thing of the past, but it is equally arguable that religion is just changing, not disappearing. Religion, as we know it, is a post-World- War-II response to the Cold War era, baby-boomer children, and suburbia. Synagogues insulated Jews against latent anti-Semitism, and provided safe spaces to rehearse ethnic identity and support of Israel. Plenty of post-war money paid denominational offices to provide the programs that a synagogue needed to ramp up and reach out.

Denominations back then had bureaucracies that churned out personnel and services; what they did not have is a clear ideological mandate to justify the personnel and services they churned out.

No one will join that kind of denomination. But denominations are what we make of them. They can define what religion is becoming not reflect what it used to be.

Precisely this ability to evolve with the times is what makes religion in America so exceptional. Indeed, one explanation for its robustness, relative to the anemic state of religion in Europe, is America’s separation of church and state, which has prevented state support and conditioned religion instead to fend for itself. Static churches, sociologists say, die out; creative ones succeed. Denominations that hunker down with old ways of thinking are indeed doomed. But denominations that think differently have a future.

This different denominational thinking must acknowledge the fact that, unlike the Cold War era, ours is a time of spiritual search. The limited liability synagogue that trades dues for services will find competitors who offer bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, and even funerals (not to mention high holidays) for a whole lot less than what it costs to be a member. And who needs denominations just for that?

But assume our synagogues respond to the spirituality surge and urge us on to be our better selves. Assume they deliver purpose, meaning, and a reason to be alive. Assume further that they ritualize these higher human goals by connecting people to each other, to their past, and to God. Assume also the existence of rabbis who have something deep to say – rabbis, that is, whose intellectual acumen is equal to whatever society offers elsewhere at its thoughtful best. Assume, in a word, that synagogues manage to ennoble the human condition in communities of commitment, where the scar tissue of entrenched routine is replaced by an intentional response to the human yearning to matter.

Suppose all this, and you get synagogues that need denominations.

A single synagogue has but limited reach while denominations unify a thousand synagogues to influence policy round the globe. Denominations can run seminaries that invest in visionaries who compete in the marketplace of big ideas. Only denominations can galvanize large scale investment for a Jewish future; rally opinion world-wide; or have a voice that must be taken seriously far away in Israel and in circles of power everywhere. Only denominations can argue our way to a viable vision of religion for the vast mass of Americans who yearn for a form of religion that is not Orthodox but is equally authentic and equally deep.

I write this after attending the latest biennial of the Reform Movement, which certainly didn’t look dead or dying. It reaffirmed its commitment to the marriage of modernity and tradition; the courage to take moral stands; an inclusive vision for Jewish Peoplehood; and a compelling portrait of Judaism at its moral and spiritual best. It was religion as it just might be, religion that only denominational greatness can provide.

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Why Faith Matters

Posted on November 9, 2011 | 9 comments

Abraham’s centrality for Western civilization has been debated ever since the earliest Christians described him as the paradigmatic “man of faith.” Salvation, they concluded, arises through “faith” (what we believe) not through “works” (what we do). The Rabbis, by contrast, emphasized works over faith.

But Abraham as a paragon of faith is part of Jewish tradition too. Only through faith in a God who summons him does Abraham leaves home and family altogether. Rav Soloveitchik has provided an entire treatise entitled ”The Lonely Man of Faith.” Faith matters in Judaism.

How could it not — faith is inherent to being human! It takes faith to imagine that anything we do at all has importance in the long run. We have little or no control over our personal fate; we cannot predict what will happen to those we love; when we die, we take nothing with us; and, frankly, how much do we remember about even our grandparents, not to mention their grandparents? The entropy of time washes memories away.

It is also not clear that what we do has any long-term impact on history, which we wish we could control but, obviously, cannot. It takes faith to act as if life is worthwhile despite regular personal setbacks and in the face of traumatic global events we never expected and have trouble controlling now that they are here.

Soloveitchik traces the human experience of faith to the Bible’s very beginning. He links the Bible’s two separate accounts of creation (Genesis 1:1-2:4; and 2:5-2:24) to parallel aspects of human nature. The first story addresses the need to be creative. “Fill the earth and master it,” God says (1:28) — in other words, “Be productive; do something.” The second narrative, however, focuses on God’s giving us “the breath of life” (2:7). Its concern is life itself: not what we fill our lives with doing but what the point of all that “doing” really is. This deeper question addresses what we mean by redemption, or (as Christians prefer saying) salvation. Story One highlights accomplishment; Story Two underscores redemption.

From childhood on we are trained to value accomplishments but, eventually, accomplishments pale. That is the message of Ecclesiastes: “Utter futility! All is futile. What real value is there in all the gains we make beneath the sun?” If that sounds jaded, just consider how history is filled with accomplishments that do not matter anymore. We go to school to get a job, get a job to build a career, build a career to get ahead, get ahead to get further ahead, and so on. But to what end? “Accomplishment” is simply what we do; “redemption“ is the certain sense of why we do it. Redemption derives from faith in a transcendent purpose, a higher ideal to which we owe allegiance. Judaism calls that God.

We are back to asking whether we are saved by works or by faith — by accomplishments, that is, or by redemption. Accomplishments satisfy the human thirst for creativity, but will not suffice at moments when we are forced to wonder why creativity matters in the first place. Faith alone can tell us we amount to something, even when we feel like failures; when devastating illness interrupts our plans; and when we die so poor as to have little sense of material accomplishment or so young as to be unable even to conceive of a lifelong project, let alone to see it through. Only faith provides the redemptive certainty that we matter regardless of how our accomplishments turn out. And only faith can measure our accomplishments in the first place.

The Bible introduces Abraham as someone of no accomplishments at all; we get no biography of him whatsoever (the Rabbis have to make all that up). Abraham’s single claim to fame is that he responds to God’s call to undertake a journey in faith. He will face disappointment after disappointment; struggle with the land to which he is summoned; lose the battle to save Lot; banish his first son Ishmael; prematurely bury his beloved wife Sarah; and die virtually alone, far away from Isaac whom he once almost sacrificed. But his faith in a God whom he never sees will not flag.

Why are Jews so heavily invested in accomplishment, but not redemption or faith? Why are we so ready to dismiss the possibility of God, of being called, and of measuring ourselves without accomplishment as our center? The challenge is hardly to be like Abraham the great accomplisher. It is to face the possibility that we are called, like Abraham, to have faith in redemption, no matter what we manage to accomplish.

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One Hundred Great Jewish Books is now available.

Posted on October 24, 2011 | 1 comment

One Hundred Great Jewish Books: Three Millennia of Jewish Conversation

One Hundred Great Jewish Books: Three Millennia of Jewish Conversation

I’m happy to announce that my latest book, One Hundred Great Jewish Books, is now available. The full title, One Hundred Great Jewish Books: Three Millennia of Jewish Conversation, reflects an idea I have been playing with for about a decade now. What is Judaism, if not an identity that is portrayed through a rolling conversation across the centuries! The book is a running record of the conversation as portrayed through every variety of Jewish book: classical texts and medieval responsa, but also modern fiction, short stories, histories, biographies, and even comic books, encyclopedias, and cook books. I read over 200 books to make the selection, but here it is at last: my running guide to the Jewish conversational record.

I hope you enjoy it, so we can continue the conversation here.

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Time To Go Back To Work

Posted on October 19, 2011 | 2 comments

If you google sukkat shalom (“sukkah of peace”), you get hundreds of references, most of them titles of synagogues and lyrics for songs. The synagogue names bespeak a deep-seated desire for places of respite. The song lyrics acknowledge the metaphor’s origin, our nightly synagogue prayer that God “spread over us Your sukkah of peace.”  We call the prayer Hashkiveinu, “Lie us down,” a perfect nighttime meditation for that twilight moment when the daily grind succumbs (we hope) to nightly rest.

Tradition connects this sukkah of peace to Amos, 9:11, God’s promise to “raise up the fallen sukkah of David,” a glorious picture of the end of time when Israel’s travails will have come to an end. The nighttime Hashkiveinu reflects this very “raising up” by following “Lie us down in peace” with, “Raise us up to life.” Here too, it is possible to see a messianic theme, relief from exilic oppression, just as Amos had foreseen.

That can hardly have been the prayer’s original intent, however. It is a mistake to think that even people in the Middle Ages lost much sleep over cataclysmic metaphysical issues like the eventual restoration of the Davidic monarchy and the coming of the messiah. These eschatological metaphors were appealing because they provided ways to ponder the more immediate problems that prey on our minds and rob us of sleep: “disease, violence, want, and agony” (dever, cherev, ra’av  v’yagon), for example. Hashkiveinu was, first and foremost, a bedtime prayer reflecting the hope for a night of peaceful sleep.

Its bedtime image of the sukkah came from the holiday that ends this week. The simple joy of sitting in a sukkah and consuming festive meals in the ambience of nature’s fullness is a perfect antidote to the harried lives we normally pursue. Whether in our nightly prayers or in the temporary booth we call a sukkah, we are invited to pause for inner reflection and outer quietude.

But as we have seen, that is only half the image of Hashkiveinu — and half the image also of the sukkah. Like it or not, “Lie us down in peace” becomes “Raise us up to life.” If “Lie us down in peace” addresses the real nighttimes we endure, then “Raise us up to life” speaks to the real daytimes we confront. A nightly wish for peace is fine, but when morning dawns, we awaken to the real world of work and worry. So too, we should not get too comfortable in our sukkah of peace. Like peace itself, the sukkah is deliberately made to be temporary, a feeble structure that cannot last. When Sukkot ends, we face the autumn preamble to the inevitable blast of winter.

Sukkot peace is not supposed to become soporific, dulling us to the tasks that will follow. We have every right to enjoy a week of languor in the sukkah, but not at the expense of deluding ourselves about what lies beyond it. Words have many opposites, some healthy, some not. An unhealthy opposite to “tranquility” is “anxiety”; a healthy one is “urgency.” When life resumes at the end of this Sukkot week, it should do so with some urgency. Life matters, after all, and life consists of the real world outside the sukkah’s walls. Both peace and struggle are part of the human package; we don’t get one without the other.

Human nature suggests we would prefer evading life’s exigencies. I am not thinking of such immediate challenges as earning a living, confronting sorrow, building relationships, and just plain making it through each day; these impinge so noticeably upon us that we can hardly avoid them (although some of us try to). My concern is the larger issues that we delude ourselves into discounting, if not downright disregarding – the fractures in our country, aging of our Jewish institutions, and dangers to our planet. The life that greets us when the sukkah comes down is not an altogether pretty thing.

Not that we should despair; there is much about the world to celebrate, and celebrate we do, when we emerge from the cocoon of the sukkah for the joy of Simchat Torah; and recollect again how “In the beginning,  God created the heavens and the earth” and found it “good.” As we take up residence in the world outside the sukkah, it is this image of natural and intended goodness that should consume us. When sitting in the sukkah ends, we “rise up to life” in a world whose continued goodness depends on us. The holiday month of Tishri gives way to Cheshvan, a month known best for having no holidays in it at all. It will be time to go back to work.

 

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9/11: Remembering How We Remembered

Posted on September 11, 2011 | 5 comments

By tomorrow, the various memorials for 9/11 around the country will be matters of memory, allowing us to remember how we remembered. That exercise is worthwhile because it elucidates two different meanings of the word “remember”: the ordinary sense in which we merely bring to mind whatever it is we want to recall and the ritual usage that goes much deeper than that. We remember 9/11 — ritually; we remember how we remembered it — ordinarily.

It’s too bad we use the same word for both. Remembering 9/11 is a far cry from remembering where we put our checkbook or the way it was when we were ten. English sometimes strives to keep them different by calling the ordinary sense “remembering,” and the ritual sense “remembrance.”

We are all familiar with rituals of remembrance, an activity common to most religions but central also to secular communal consciousness. Even societies that deliberately reject religion — France during the French Revolution and the Soviet Union, for example  — practice them. If nothing else, they must remember the revolutionary moment in which they were formed, and for that, they need something sacred, if not “religious.” Central to the act is usually an attempt to relive what happened in condensed form: rereading a Declaration of Independence, perhaps, or recreating a mock battle. With 9/11, there were six moments of silence — one for each of the four hijacked planes that caused the mayhem and one more for each of the buildings that crumbled.

Television too played this ritual role by reliving the day’s fateful horrors. Witnesses remembered what it was like; young people described growing up in the shadow of the tragedy, and pundits waxed eloquent on the meaning of the occasion — not to provide information that we didn’t know already, but to ritualize the knowledge we already had, by reviewing it, rehearsing it, re-feeling it, and reliving it.

Because ritual remembrance is a category of the sacred, and because Judaism and Christianity are religions where remembering is central, we can learn a lot about even the secular act of remembrance by borrowing terms and concepts from Jewish-Christian understanding.

First, Christian. At his Last Supper, Jesus famously said, “Do this in memory of me.” Ever since, the primary liturgical act for Christians has been the Eucharist, a ritualized replication of that moment, described by the Greek term for remembrance, anamnesis. The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship calls the Greek word ”practically untranslatable in English. ‘Memorial,’  ‘commemoration,’ ‘remembrance’ all suggest a recollection of the past, whereas anamnesis means making present an object or person from the past.” What matters is this sense of “making present,” as if past and present coalesce into a single intensive experience of “now.” It is as if we are able to inhabit two separate points in time simultaneously. Time stops momentarily (and momentously), as “then” and “now” become the same.

Jews do not use the Greek, but have the same ritual consciousness in, for example, the wedding ceremony where the concluding “seven blessings” (the sheva b’rakhot) invoke the idyllic Garden of Eden on one hand, and final redemption yet to come, on the other, collapsing them both into the current blissful moment under the wedding canopy.

In lieu of the Greek anamnesis, the specifically Jewish contribution is the parallel Hebrew word for remembrance, zekher (or zikaron, a variant that means the same thing). We hear regularly of a zekher with reference to the Temple, creation, leaving Egypt, and other events and realities of another era. But the most telling use of zekher comes from the Talmud which employs the term legally by saying, “There may be no proof for such and such a proposition, but there is a zekher for it.” Zecher Can hardly mean “remembrance” here.  It is better translated as,” pointer.”

Now we understand ritual remembrance. It is a pointer that fastens our attention across time, space, and even logic. It attaches where we are to somewhere else we wish to be. It rivets our consciousness on our inherent connectivity to something that might otherwise be lost among the disparate sense perceptions that constantly assail us, as if to say that regardless of how our lives may change, this particular pathway of attentiveness must never be lost. We move on with our lives when the moment of remembrance ends, but the connecting tissue to the event being memorialized attends us wherever we go, deepening our sense of what matters and committing ourselves to the lessons that flow from it.

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The Messy Search for Law and Order

Posted on September 3, 2011 | 2 comments

The things that matter most we rarely know for sure. Among them are the great issues of truth and justice. They go together, as we all know, nowadays, from the long-standing television series Law and Order. In the first half of every episode, the police seek out truth; in the second half, the courts  establish justice. Readers of Torah could have gotten that message from this week’s portion which calls on the Israelites to establish shoftim v’shotrim, “judges and officials.” The officials are the police: the truth finders; the judges allocate justice.

This interdependence of truth and justice comes through also in the blessing that follows the haftarah. “All of God’s words,” we are assured, “are true and just.” But only God is absolutely trustworthy regarding either. The human condition presupposes doubt on both. The S’fat Emet affirms, “It is impossible to arrive at absolute truth”; and D’rashot El Ami acknowledges, “From a human perspective there are many kinds of justice, just as there are many kinds of truth.”

We seem, therefore, to be in absolute need of truth and justice, but absolutely unable to arrive at either of them absolutely. This is not to say that they are relative; we must differentiate the way things are known (“ontology,” in philosophical language) from the human capacity to know the way they are (“epistemology,” as the philosophers say). It is only our ability to know them (epistemology) that is flawed.

So here’s our dilemma. How do we run a society which requires public policy based on truths and rooted in justice, when we can know neither of them for certain?

To begin with, we can take seriously the lesson that “there are many kinds of truth.” Realities about such evils as war and poverty are known not just through quantitative data, but from the stories people tell, whether biographical or purely literary. The old TV program Dragnet featured LA detective Joe Friday eliciting “just the facts.” But “just the facts” are never enough. Take Stephen Crane’s Civil War masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, for example. Its empathy for wartime suffering transcends statistical comparisons of battle casualties. Read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and you understand poverty in ways that “just the facts” will never reveal.

Judaism captures this sort of complexity with the term yosher — neither truth nor justice, but a third category: a “feel for” equity, righteousness, the “rightness” of things. Budgets, for example, should be more than “just”; they should also be “right” — a response to the overall situation, including mitigating factors beyond what the letter of the law understands as “just the facts.”

It is rightness that we have in mind on Rosh Hashanah when we picture a courtroom with one seat of justice and another of mercy, and ask God to occupy the latter before passing judgment. There may be mitigating factors that a Stephen Crane, John Steinbeck or Victor Hugo might pick up, but that “just the facts” would overlook.

The nuanced nature of truth and justice is the overall theme, generally, of these seven weeks of transition from Tisha B’av to the high holy days. It emerges from the Haftarah readings (known collectively as “the seven portions of comfort”) which constitute a serialized dialogue with God on the possibility of renewal following exile. The stage is set on Shabbat Nachamu, “the Sabbath of comfort,” where, God urges Isaiah to “comfort, comfort my people.”  But what comfort can there be if truth is one-sided, and guilt unmodulated by matters of rightness?  Technically, Israel has sinned and deserves punishment. So one week later, Israel responds, dubiously, “But Adonai has forsaken me!” God, however, knows human nature; understands human weakness; and, through our prayers (spoken and silent), hears the stories we have to tell about why we acted as we did.  So the third week, God reiterates the promise: “Unhappy storm-tossed one, I will give you foundations of sapphires.” And now, this week, God underscores the fact that “I, it is I who comfort you,” a reminder that God’s insight (unlike ours) is perfect: God gets at the rightness of things; God tempers justice with mercy in a manner toward which we can only strive.

Strive for it we should (hence, the accent on “pursuit” in this week’s admonition,” Justice, justice, you shall pursue“) but with the full admission of its complexity.  Whether personal quarrels, organizational planning, or matters of congressional debate, the sides involved would do well to remember that they are not God; that there are many roads to truth; that fullness of understanding arrives through people’s stories, not just the facts; and that justice should be tempered by “rightness.”

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Dreams and Visions

Posted on August 5, 2011 | 8 comments

Hardly anyone reads the prophet Joel nowadays. In part, it is simply too painful. His opening vision of a plague is devastating. Then too, he reverses both Micah (4:3) and Isaiah (2:4) who promise a future when, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not take up sword against nation; They shall never again know war.” Joel turns it around. His idea of consolation is that Israel will prepare specifically for war; “They shall beat their plowshares into swords and their pruning hooks into spears” (4:10).

But there is another side to Joel. I learned it years ago, listening to Reform Jewish teenagers singing a Debbie Friedman melody: “Your old shall dream dreams, and your youth shall see visions” (Joel 3:1). At the time, so many years back, I identified with the youth who would see visions. Older now, I settle for the first part of the verse, dreams. But I admit it: dreams fall short of visions. Dreamers are not visionaries.

Visionaries see promise beyond our present that the old dismiss as just a dream. Joel calls their visions chezyonot (singular: chizayon). A chizayon, says the midrash, is one of ten names by which the gift of the holy spirit is known.

The reason this comes to mind is that Tisha B’av, which falls next week, is preceded by Shabbat Chazon, “The Sabbath of Vision.” Chazon and chizayon are similar names for the same thing: “vision” – but a chazon is negative; a chizayon need not be. “Chazon denotes divine censure” says the medieval commentator, Redak; It designates our failures, our sins, our historical nadirs.

Shabbat Chazon, then, is not a happy Sabbath. It gets its name from its haftarah reading, Isaiah 1:1, where the prophet envisions, “Your land will be desolate; your cities burned!”

Some commentators think chazon here refers not just to the haftarah, but to all of Isaiah, whose final verse (66:24) predicts maggot-infested corpses lying in the fields; “a horror to all flesh.” Traditionally, we follow 66:24 by rereading verse 66:23 (“All flesh will come to worship Me”) so as not to end on such a note of terror.

Why does Isaiah see a terrifying chazon while Joel, living in no better time, and prone to seeing the worst anyway, sees a hopeful chizayon?

The answer is that Joel himself does not see the chizayon. He can’t. By his own testimony, he can at best dream dreams. Only the youth get chezyonot. Our future always lies with youthful promise. So I ask: in the councils of power, our Federations, synagogues, and governing boards of institutions, where is the voice of our 20 and 30 year olds?

Truth is: usually, nowhere — partly by their own choice, but a choice conditioned by our failure to invite them in. We, the older generation, tend to look for every new chazon. The history we know best has prepared us for disasters around every corner. We even thrive on the threat of a chazon every so often. We raise money on it, galvanize the community around it. What we are not very good at – us elders, I mean – is trumpeting the promise of a chizayon, precisely what the next generation would bring.

The Talmud rules that if the preparation day prior to Tisha B’av falls on Shabbat, instead of limiting our joy then, “We may eat and drink all we need, even as much as a banquet of King Solomon” (Ta’anit 29b). A kabbalistic tradition extends the teaching to say that Shabbat releases the light of redemption, so when Shabbat and Tisha B’av intertwine, even the sacred light hidden away in the tragic memory of Tisha B’av can be freed.

The report contains an important lesson: Even our deepest day of mourning has the promise of redemption.

But redemption requires a chizayon of what might be, not just a chazon of what we think always was. We need a chizayon of tomorrow’s promise, not just a chazon that relives yesterday’s suspicions.

Even in a week devoted to fasting for our past, it is no mistake to imagine a glorious future – a future that comes soon, not in some far-off messianic era. That imagination is unlikely to come from a generation that has mostly known trauma. We need desperately to empower a new generation, unspoiled, unjaded, capable not just of passing dreams but of realizable and promising visions.

 

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The Four Freedoms: A Report Card 70 Years Later

Posted on August 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

Everyone (not just Americans) ought to read President Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address. Pearl Harbor was almost a year away, but foreseeing the eventual need to confront tyranny, Roosevelt virtually predicted why we would go to war: to preserve our essential four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These he called America’s true arsenal.

It’s 2011, the 70th anniversary year of Roosevelt’s address. How are the four freedoms faring — for Americans and for Jews?

Americans would have to say that the two freedom’s “of” are doing well. Both freedom of speech and freedom of worship remain sacrosanct. The press remains free, and (so far anyway) we have steadfastly retained separation of church and state. Give them both an A on America’s Freedom Report Card.

The “freedoms from,” however, have suffered. Freedom from fear took a blow on 9/11, not just because we were attacked from without, but because the government sanctioned secret arrest and torture within. We deserved an F for that, but are working our way back to an A again.

Freedom from want is another matter. At the moment, the top 1% of the population owns as much as the lowest 90%. Minorities suffer particularly. According to the July 26 Pew Study, “The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households…. the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these three groups for the two decades prior to the Great Recession that ended in 2009.”

Not that most Americans think that recession has ended! Our current quarterly growth rate is only 1.3%! Yet Congress steadfastly thinks the problem is we spend too much (!) on the elderly and the poor. Fiscally speaking, I am a moderate, but even I find it hard to believe that our leaders care very much about very many. The economic revival gets a B-; the national ethos of increasing greed and mean-spiritedness gives us an F.

I say this not to carp. America remains a magnificent country. We are privileged to live in it. As a Jew (especially), I am grateful beyond words. I just wish everyone had enough to eat.

Roosevelt’s four freedoms apply universally–they are minimum demands of a free society.  American Jews, therefore, have our own report card to consider. Our pattern is just the opposite of America’s. The “Freedom froms” get passing grades, but we fail the “freedom tos.”

Thanks largely to Federation, to which we are accustomed to giving generously, the Jewish poor have freedom from want; and because American anti-Semitism is minimal, we have freedom from fear as well. But we deserve no A for freedom of speech and freedom of worship.

As to freedom of speech, critique of Jewish sacred cows is not easily tolerated among us.  The ultra right wing has a stranglehold on Israeli politics; we are constantly defending ourselves from having our rights cut off by governmental fiat. We should be headlining our opposition to proposed bills in the Knesset that deprive women of their rights and make second-class citizens out of Jews who are not Orthodox enough for the extremists. Yet we barely utter a word. Rampant anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Israel sentiment makes us wary of speaking out in public, perhaps. But how ironic! We finally live in a country that guarantees freedom of speech and then restrict our own free speech when it comes to Jewish matters!

Freedom of Jewish worship doesn’t do much better, but for different reasons. Here, we suffer from idolatry of authenticity. Enamored of some imagined sacred ideal of the past, we have forgotten how to experiment with Jewish worship in ways that restore its spiritual vigor. Each movement has its own challenges here, but except for the minority of people who have mastered the prayer book and the accepted ways to get through it, Jewish worship can be baffling and forbidding at best, exclusive and irrelevant at worst. We need to give ourselves the freedom to become revolutionary in our insistence that prayer can matter once again.

American security, Roosevelt insisted, in his 1941 address, would come only if “those who build our defenses” enjoy “an unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending.” That goes for Americans and for Jews. Standing firmly, openly, and vociferously for what is right is the best way to guarantee Jewish continuity. Within America as a whole, we should be at the forefront of demanding a better score on freedom from want; within our own ranks, we should be vigilant about freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

 

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Kol Nidre: A Sneak Preview

Posted on July 23, 2011 | 2 comments

It seems a long way off, but before we know it, summer swelter will give way to autumn cool, and we will be back in synagogue listening to Kol Nidre. The roots of Kol Nidre lie in this week’s parashah, where Moses cautions the people, “If a man makes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath imposing an obligation on himself, he may not break his pledge.”  We find two categories here: “vow” (neder) and “oath” (sh’vu’ah). Both are ways of forbidding something to oneself: saying, for example (by neder), “I vow never to give you a gift again”; or (by sh’vu’ah), “I swear, by God, never to give you a gift again.”

But the Hebrew for obligation (issar) was taken as yet a third category, and others too were eventually added to the lexicon of sacred promises that must be honored.  Kol Nidre is a prayer from the ninth century (or so) that effects the annulment of them all. Its various terms (nidrei, konamei, kinusei, etc.) denote the legal niceties of these various classes of oaths and vows.

Buried in this legal nitpicking are a number of lessons that touch the halakhic understanding of human nature and our relationship to God.

Take, for example, the interesting possibility of a person pledging (by vow or by oath) not to fulfill a mitzvah.  A husband dies, let us say, and the grieving widow is so devastated that she vows (or swears) never to light Shabbat candles again. We saw above how a person might vow (or swear) never to give someone a gift.  Gift-giving is optional: a woman may indeed decide never to give her recalcitrant son any more presents. But candle-lighting is commanded; may she promise never to light Shabbat candles?

The answer is that she may, but only through a neder (a vow), not a sh’vu’ah (an oath). That is because the prohibition of a neder is considered as falling upon the thing being forbidden, while the prohibition of a sh’vu’ah (an oath) is seen as devolving on the person doing the forbidding. In our case, then, the woman is allowed to define a particularly difficult mitzvah as beyond her psychological ken (through a neder), even though she may not define herself as beyond the doing of it (through a sh’vu’ah).

But why is that? Don’t these amount to the same thing, in the long run?

Rabbi Daniel Landes explains the difference with theological sensitivity. In an essay on the halakhah of vows composed for a book I am editing on Kol Nidre (All These Vows, Jewish Lights Publishing, August, 2011), he explains that in general, the obligation to do mitzvot goes back to an oath (a sh’vu’ah)  that our ancestors made at Sinai. Halakhah does not permit us to break that oath, which we, as Jews, inherit as our mandate. “It is the person who is obliged at Sinai,” however, “not the objects of halakhah to which the person relates,” and a vow (a neder), as we have seen, falls on the object, not the person.

Even more interesting than the halakhah itself, I think, is the idea that seems to lie behind it.  Under the force of trauma, we may find this or that mitzvah too much to bear, to the point where we may vow not to do it. Even without being traumatized, we may find ourselves questioning a particular halakhic act, to the point where we pledge to abandon it. And God, as it were, understands all this; God appreciates the dilemmas that life deals us. But the focus must remain the traumatizing or alienating activity that we would otherwise gladly do, not we, the doers of it, for no matter how estranged halakhic acts may appear, we are not permitted to assume that we are personally estranged from the comforting presence of God.

It is hoped that we will return to doing the mitzvah, of course – our hypothetical woman may annul her rash vow not to light Shabbat candles. And until she does, she may indeed abandon it. She should know, however, that God never abandons her.

Judaism is about obligations; but obligations are about relationships. Halakhic theory accepts the fact that for a time, at least, this or that obligation may seem painfully beyond us. It does not, however, countenance our imagining that we are painfully removed from God. The divine-human relationship is sacrosanct.

What we see here in Judaism’s insistence on the love of God. Churches regularly proclaim God’s love. Synagogues don’t, but should. A loving God is central to everything Judaism holds dear.

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Why New Moons Matter

Posted on June 30, 2011 | 2 comments

This is quite a holiday weekend. Americans everywhere look forward to July 4th, with its barbecues and fireworks, picnics and parades. Not to be outdone, our neighbors to the north celebrate Canada Day about the same time (“1867, July ONE, Canada became a do-min-ION”). And we Jews? We keep our respective national holidays (July 1 or July 4), but squeezed between the two mega- days of national consciousness for Canada and the United States is a specifically Jewish holiday as well: Rosh Chodesh: the new moon, the first day of the month — in this case, the month of Tammuz.

Americans do not celebrate new months; they dread them, as the day that rent and mortgage payments are due. Months are arbitrary, corresponding to nothing astronomical. We once had only ten of them; two more (July and August) were added by Julius and Augustus Caesar. Jews, by contrast, regard months as having significance. Our year is solar, but our months adhere to the waxing and waning of the moon. Holidays often fall on moon days: the new moon (Rosh Hashanah) or the full moon (Passover, Purim, and Sukkot).

Nowadays, the new moon is marked mostly just by relatively arcane liturgical customs that are noticed only by regular synagogue goers. But Jews in antiquity took the new moon seriously. According to the Yerushalmi, women observed it as a holiday. Ex post facto, the Rabbis judged it “acceptable” and gave it a midrashic rationale — but I doubt the women cared. The moon appealed to them as a natural symbol for their own monthly cycles. According to the Mishnah, they also danced on the full moon of Av, and “spun yarn by moonlight.” I suspect they were doing more than spinning yarn. This was probably part of a larger set of women’s rituals that the Rabbis knew about but neither investigated nor controlled. It was what women did: outside their purview.

It wasn’t just women who celebrated new moons, however. In medieval Erets Yisra’el, Jews marked them with a full Kiddush, the prayer we say to inaugurate Shabbat and holidays (like Pesach and Rosh Hashanah). The new moon Kiddush dropped out of use by the time of the Crusades, but we still have its wording, which is worth looking at for what it teaches us about Jewish values. It praises God for revealing the “secret of the moon’s renewal,” for “appointing people of wisdom who can determine the times of the new moons and holy days,” and for “calculating the tiniest divisions of time” that produce the calendar.

Astronomy was considered the queen of the sciences back then. What we have here, therefore, is a holiday thanking God for running the universe according to the natural laws of science, and then giving us scientists to figure out what those laws are.

What a spectacular idea – not at all like the usual holiday fare. Both American Independence Day and Canada Day celebrate the establishment of national entities. Each of them celebrates national freedom – secular parallels to Passover and Chanukah, or to the French Bastille Day, for that matter. Other holidays that turn up everywhere recall tragedy: Yom Hashoah for Jews, 9/11 (still in the making) for America. Sometimes we memorialize our war dead: Remembrance Day in Canada, Memorial Day in the States, Yom Hazikaron in Israel. Thanksgiving for food and well-being is common also: Sukkot and Shavuot come quickly to mind – and Thanksgiving Day itself, of course. Religions also mark our relationship to God: for Jews, the High Holidays, and the month of Elul leading up to it; for Christians, it is Lent, which culminates in Easter.

But science? What religion stops regularly to thank God for the laws of the universe? Where else do you find a religious culture dedicated to the awe one feels when contemplating the “starry sky above,” that philosopher Immanuel Kant saw as the ultimate source of spirituality? It is no accident that so many rabbis over the years have been scientists as well; or that so many Jewish scientists have found no conflict between their science and their Judaism.

I come from Canada, originally. I might phone home this year to wish my relatives a good Canada Day. I will certainly be out myself celebrating July 4. But I will not lose sight of Rosh Chodesh, squeezed innocently away between the two. Blessed is God who designed a universe replete with mathematical beauty; blessed is God who gave us minds to calculate the equations by which it works; blessed is God who revels in our mastery of scientific secrets.

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