Liberal Judaism at the Crossroads

Posted on April 26, 2011 | 12 comments

Liberal Judaism pioneered the notion that Judaism was a religion. The idea came from Napoleon who let it be known that only as a religion did Judaism have a place in the modern nation state. Ever since then, Jews have been trying to figure out what a religion actually is and, depending on their answer, whether we really are one.

For Jews in Christian countries, religion was a system of belief that was operationalized in worship: exactly what Reform Judaism became in the nineteenth century. But Napoleon never got as far as eastern Europe, and when eastern European Jews came here, they found Reform Judaism’s version of religion baffling.

America was fully Protestantized, however, and by the 1950s, President Eisenhower was trumpeting religious affiliation as the civic and moral responsibility of all Americans. So eastern European Jews too became officially religious. They built synagogues, and claimed a set of Jewish beliefs, usually as Conservative Jews, however, not Reform. By now, Reform Judaism too has been thoroughly colonized by the eastern European ethos.

But here’s the problem: Eastern European Jews never did take religious belief very seriously. Protestants had some doctrinal “truths” about Jesus and salvation. We had no such deep religious truths in which we believed. We weren’t even sure we believed in God.

But if we had few (if any) transcendent truths to offer, what then did we have?

One option would have been halakhah, but that has largely failed within liberal circles. Through guides to Jewish conduct, Reform Jews have tried resurrecting it on occasion, but as much as Reform Judaism values rabbinic literature, and despite the fact that it issues responsa, it is simply not a halachic movement. The same is true of Reconstructionism. Within the ranks of progressive Jews, Conservative Judaism alone has made a genuine attempt to remain halachic — but with limited success. Unless you are Orthodox, the plausibility of living one’s life according to a halachic mandate has become harder and harder to champion.

For some time, we have been able to draw on the external agenda of anti-Semitism and support of Israel. But there isn’t much anti-Semitism in America, and even though Israel is still embattled, its right-wing government confounds us, its right-wing religion attacks us, and the coming generation sees Israel as Goliath rather than David.

A more recent fallback position has been “family.” Self-evidently, American Jews come to Judaism for family rites of passage. These are not what they claim to be: rites of passage of individuals from birth to bar/bat mitzvah to marriage and the grave. They are successful celebrations of family unity across generations. In the face of divorce and family fallout, they demonstrate that family ties still bind. But these are relatively rare events, expensive in terms of synagogue dues, and demanding no communal Jewish commitment in between. So our numbers remain static as generations of bar/bat mitzvah parents come and go.

The fact that liberal synagogues have become life-cycle factories is no new insight. What I am offering is an explanation of it. Lacking faith in anything very deep, and unable (Conservative) and unwilling (Reform and Reconstructionist) to galvanize a liberal halachic option with much traction, we have claimed family dysfunction as our mission. It works, as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go far enough,

A second fallback position has been the  claim that we provide community. Here too, we are responding to family dysfunction, this time by addressing loneliness and vulnerability. In another era, intact families might have provided support for people in crisis. Now people need options. We provide one – or, at least, we claim to; hence, the popularity of healing and the emphasis on caring communities. There are other forces at work as well: baby boomers living longer and becoming the sandwich generation caring for their own parents and also for their children but having no one to care for them.

But whatever the reason, we sell religion as community, and insofar as we provide it, we may succeed at holding our own and even growing. The evidence, however, is against our being able to do this very well. Except for synagogue clergy, professionals, and the “regulars” (the self-selected “insiders” for whom synagogue really is community), most synagogues are not seen as communities that care, nurture, and provide whatever it is that beleaguered boomers want. At least life-cycle celebration is something we are good at. Community, apparently, is not. And the next generation, the boomers’ children may not even want it.

So we have experimented with a third strategy. Religion, we say, provides personal meaning. I think we have a long way to go to make this claim convincing, but at least we are on the right path. More on that another time. Suffice it to say that this is where spirituality comes in. Liberal religion will offer spirituality, or it will fail.

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The Catholic Liturgical Controversy and Why We All Have A Stake In It

Posted on April 21, 2011 | 3 comments

The New York Times of April 12, 2011 prepares the Roman Catholic communities of the English speaking world for a new translation of the mass. The maelstrom of charges and countercharges surrounding it illustrates how vital liturgy is in defining identity; at stake is a whole lot more than an ivory tower debate about the meaning of the Latin.

The “old” translation that the new one replaces followed a historic 1963 decision to authorize prayer in the vernacular in the first place. That ruling heralded a newly liberalized era for Roman Catholics. Among other things, it invited lay participation in a liturgy that had been dominated by priests; acknowledged the adverse impact of sexist language; broke down social distance between clergy and congregants; invited a new look at what united Christians rather than what separated them from each other; and abolished prayers that had fostered anti-Semitism.

The new translation heralds an equally significant shift in Catholic identity: a return of the Church to its conservative moorings.

Whereas Catholics now declare “Jesus Christ … one in being with the Father,” the new liturgy calls him “consubstantial with the father.” In the old liturgy, “he descended to the dead.” In the new one, “He descended into Hell.” In the old liturgy, the presider’s opening greeting, “The Lord be with you,” elicited the congregational response, “And also with you.” The new one has the people say, “And with your spirit.”

Critics of the proposed new liturgy charge it with (among other things) obfuscating meaning for everyday people (what’s “consubstantial”?); demanding word for word translation from the Latin at the expense of normative English word flow;  and actually missing the point of what the framers of the Latin would themselves have said if they had spoken twenty-first-century English. Advocates of change think the liturgy of the past forty or so years has twisted church doctrine and liberalized Catholic thinking to the point of encouraging moral laxity. The new texts are supposed to produce what the Vatican has labeled liturgiam authenticam, a liturgy that is “authentic.”

As an outsider, I have no legitimate standing in this internal debate. But as a liturgist, I know something about liturgical authenticity. It doesn’t exist.

We legitimately call a suspected Rembrandt or Ming vase “authentic” because we can compare them to a set of unarguably authentic specimens (the corpus of Rembrandt paintings or collections of undisputed Ming vases). When it comes to liturgical translations, however, there are no originals to point to. Nor can you point to the Latin, since it is precisely the meaning of the Latin that is at issue. The same is true of theology: what counts as authentic belief is what the argument is all about to start with.

Conservatives frequently use the word “authentic” to chide liberals for playing fast and free with “the real thing.” Using “authentic” that way is not, well, not “authentic.” It’s not the way “authentic” is authentically used.  By all means, let the Church do due diligence in debating what it wishes to pray, but not under the misleading rubric of authenticity.

The real issues are much deeper than a pseudo-debate on authenticity. What should Catholics believe about God, human nature, and the promise of salvation? What is the proper relationship between the laity and the clergy? Should Catholics be in communion with Protestants? What do Catholics believe about Jews?

How the church goes about deciding these deeper liturgical questions says a lot about who has power and who doesn’t. How hierarchical should the twenty-first century Church be? Who gets to weigh in on liturgical matters? Whose opinion counts and whose does not?

As a Jew, I have no say on Catholic doctrine, but I do have an interest in it. The whole world does. At stake is a great Church with a magnificent heritage. Under the impact of Vatican II, it apologized for anti-Semitism, and rejected its imperialistic past. It emerged from medieval triumphalism and sought common ground with others. Through the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, it has issued conscientious statements on matters of economic justice and human equality. We should hope that it remains a mighty force in the world, allying with good people everywhere in the fight for saving the planet, ending hunger, and achieving world harmony.

I don’t have to be Catholic to pray that the new translation does not further divide Catholics from others, or return the Catholic Church to the day when it thought Jews were damned, men counted more than women, and no one else had God’s truths. I hope the Church does not decide that “authenticity” to the Catholic past trumps possibility for the human future.

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Is Blogging a Liturgy?

Posted on April 17, 2011 | 2 comments

Zvee Zahavy posts the fascinating question of whether blogging is liturgy. All liturgies are rituals, so we can begin by asking if blogging is a ritual. There is something ritualistic about it, in that it follows certain procedures and obeys certain loosely defined rules of what counts as a proper blog. It even has its own vocabulary. But is that enough for it to be a ritual?

I think not. A great deal of behavior is ritualized, but not all ritualized behavior is a ritual.

Ronald Grimes, perhaps the most influential founder of the field called Ritual Studies, distinguishes “ritualizations” from actually acted out “rites.” What he calls rites, most people call rituals. Rituals, in that sense, get names: bar mitzvah, Kol Nidre, a funeral, Easter vigil, Shabbat services. Secular examples include birthday parties, St. Patrick Day parades, and a Christmas office party.

Ritualizations include any behavior that gets formalized and consciously repeated a certain way. Grimes mentions canoeing, watching TV, and housework. These are ritualizations but not yet rituals. They might become rituals, but to do so, in my view, they would have to have cultural importance beyond themselves; they would have to mean something, the way a birthday party means celebrating another year of life, an office party at an accounting firm means marking the end of tax season, and Shabbat services mean keeping Shabbat.

Blogging is a ritualized form of communication. It is a ritualization. It is not a ritual, although, conceivably, for certain bloggers under certain circumstances, it might become one.

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What’s this blog all about anyway?

Posted on April 15, 2011 | 16 comments

I do not usually admit this right off the bat – it is definitely a conversation stopper – but here it is: I am a liturgist. “Liturgy” is a common enough word among Christians, but it does not flow trippingly off Jewish tongues, and I am not only Jewish but a rabbi to boot. The word comes from the Greek, leitourgia, “public service,” which is how Greek civilization thought of service to the gods. The Jewish equivalent is the Temple cult of antiquity – in Hebrew, avodah, which meant the same thing, the work of serving God. That eventually morphed into what people do in church and synagogue. Christians call it liturgy; Jews call it “services.”

Narrowly defined, liturgy is the history and meaning of the prayers that go into services. But that constrained understanding misses the most important point, namely, that liturgy is a kind of performance. No one buys a prayer book for personal reading purposes. If the thing doesn’t get prayed from, it doesn’t count as liturgy any more.  So liturgy is the way a community defines its public identity; it is the ritualized ways we go about announcing who we are to other people (who, we hope, will say the same sort of thing back to us, and thereby let us know we are not alone). That’s where “life” comes in. Liturgy is the place where text meets life. Everyone has a liturgy, usually more than one, in fact.

Birthday parties are liturgies; so too are presidential debates, Super Bowl parties, Oscar night, half-time shows, and a whole lot of business meetings. Sometimes these accomplish other things, but they are liturgical in form: people dress a certain way, sit in certain seats, eat certain foods, and say predictable things. Liturgies define calendars: the way we mark time, what we consider holidays, and why those holidays matter. They require certain spaces: board rooms for executive meetings, dining rooms for formal parties, the Oval Office for presidential announcements. They establish community (who gets invited) and pecking orders within them (who hosts, acts as chair, gets honored, and sets the agenda). They both build on and establish tradition. The liturgies people attend and the energy they put into them are pretty good indications of who and what those people value most.

So what’s this blog all about? It’s “a little bit of liturgy” but because liturgy is the way we ritualize life, it is a whole lot more about life. It’s my unabashed take on a lot of life: our communities, our values, our identity, and our stories in the making – but with a twist, a liturgical twist, the insight that comes from knowing that human beings are ritualizing animals, and that how and what we ritualize says a lot about who and what we want to be.

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Yom Hasho’ah is virtually upon us….

Posted on April 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

Yom Hasho’ah is virtually upon us, but each and every year, it becomes more difficult to know what to make of it. The facts are clear enough. Thanks to Holocaust memorials, museums, archives, books and videos, we will have no trouble pointing to the awful record of the time and saying, “See what happened.” But having pointed to it, what lessons shall we ask the Jews of the late 21st century and beyond to take from it?

We have never been quite clear on that. Until the 1960s, we were unable even to acknowledge the enormity of it all – it took the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann to correct our Jewish reticence on the subject, let alone to invite conversation by others. Then too, we have had to contend with Holocaust deniers, some of whom still surface from time to time. With all this energy going into the “what” of the Holocaust, we have not sufficiently broached the “so what” of the thing, and it is time we got that straight, because without it, we will know exactly what to point to but we will not know why we are doing the pointing.

Two long-term approaches are patent. On the one hand, there are particularists who see the Shoah as a lesson in Jewish survivalism. The Herzlian Zionists had it right when they said the world is inherently anti-Semitic and Jews can never rest secure. Hitlers can and will rise up — anywhere, any time. Only a Jewish State can save us, and a Jewish State must ever be vigilant because Jews can trust nobody. The purpose of remembrance is to know in our very bones just how vulnerable we are, by seeing how little the world cared about our virtual disappearance.

On the other hand, there are universalists who remind us of other attempted genocides, like the ethnic cleansing of Bosnians by Serbs and the ongoing massacre even now of Africans in Darfur. We Jews rightly bristle when people lump our own experience in with that of everyone else, as if one genocide is the same as any other, so that no attention need be paid to the specificity of each one: the Jewish instance has its own uniqueness, after all. But even that lesson can have universal application, in that other attempts to eliminate entire races and ethnicities should also not be homogenized into a single worthless truism of “let’s remember all the groups who almost disappeared.” If we remember all of them as one, we remember none of them at all.

This particularistic-universalistic debate is nothing new. Planners of Holocaust memorials necessarily face up to it. But the rest of us do not. And it is time we did, for otherwise, we will be historically rich in knowing the facts but spiritually bankrupt in explaining why they matter.

Both lessons matter — profoundly. They are both true.

Irrational hostility toward Israel by otherwise thoughtful people who simultaneously ignore the most vile dictators who are Israel’s enemies and who are genuine criminals against humanity is the surest demonstration of the need for Jewish vigilance. But the Jewish mission can hardly be defensiveness without some corollary sense of why Jews should stick around to start with, and therein lies the universal lesson of the Shoah, just one of many universalisms that Judaism once introduced to western culture and still proudly defends as the prophetic message the world needs to hear.

I read this week’s sedra with all this in mind. Entitled K’doshim (“holy”), it commands us to be holy as God is holy. To practice honesty in business; to demand justice; to care for the deaf and the blind; not to stand idly by the blood of others: these are the heart of this week’s Torah. What could be more universal than “sanctifying” the world, kiddush, in Hebrew. But the same word attached to shem (“God’s name”) gives us the possibility of dying al kiddush hashem, our term for martyrdom, precisely the other pole of the Sho’ah, what we want desperately to avoid.

We enter Yom Hashoah with Parashat K’doshim ringing in our ears, and the dual lesson of what the Shoah means beyond sacred memory of the people who died and of how they met their end. We need remain vigilant against ever again suffering the fate of dying al Kiddush hashem. But similarly, we need vigilance against injustice, poverty, and the condition of helplessness that makes anyone a victim of history. The world’s oppressed ought at least to count on Jews to come to their aid when no one else seems anxious to do so.

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