Tag Archives: Israel

We Stand Together: But For What?

Posted on September 10, 2012 | 1 comment

Rosh Hashanah follows hard upon Atem Nitzavim (“You stand…”), a Torah reading so compelling that some synagogues read it again on Yom Kippur, as a reminder of what really matters in the world. It is part of Moses’ final speech, given to the Israelites as they finally reach the Promised Land. They are not all that far from where Abraham himself first set foot upon the place. Abraham was guaranteed progeny as numerous as the stars above his head and the sand beneath his feet. The progeny have returned.

“You stand” (atem nitzavim) says Moses, “all of you, to enter the covenant of Adonai your God.”

The word “stand” (nitzavim) reminds us of Psalm 82:1, where it is used similarly of God. “Adonai stands [nitzav] in the divine council (adat el) to do justice.” Medieval commentator Ibn Ezra identifies this “divine council” as Israel, God’s people who are charged with justice. God and Israel stand together then, in the pursuit of justice as the essence of the human march through history. We, Israel, stand up together, “all of us” to confirm the covenant. God stands up with us to confirm that the covenant we enact is devoted to the decency and nobility whence all justice flows.

There is no authentic Jewish existence without this commitment to decency and nobility. According to another commentator, the Maharam, it is the Jewish Land itself that guarantees united Jewish loyalty to this end. And indeed, one reads the Zionist record with pride in that regard. Almost without exception, our Zionist forebears argued vociferously, but with visionary passion for a Jewish state that stood for decency and nobility.

By contrast, passion for decency and nobility are singularly lacking today. The squabbles that make and break the Knesset coalitions are purely political: the self-serving pursuit of power, which is to say, doing what one can rather than what one should. In addition, so many Israeli politicians have abused the public trust. A 2005 study measured the extent to which people associate their government with corruption. Of the 18 countries surveyed, Israel topped the list in discontent!

It is not just politics that deepens suspicions of moral decay. We are also becoming more and more accustomed to outrageously indecent pronouncements from extremist circles in Israel. Diaspora Jews can hardly clean up Israeli politics; but we can shout to the rooftops when patent racism and inequality are preached as if they were Judaism. The Haftarah that accompanies the Torah reading of Nitzavim proclaims, “For the sake of Zion, I will not be silent; for the sake of Jerusalem, I will not be still.” The speaker of these lines is variously identified as Israel or as God — both of us stand together, after all; both of us should be standing up for decency. I suspect God is, but are we? Jews need not agree on everything, but almost universally, we all do recognize and despise blatant racism, for example. We all should be saying so.

The divine council of Psalm 82 is a virtual thing, Jewish voices everywhere protesting the need (again from Psalm 82) “to defend the weak and fatherless, vindicate the afflicted and the poor, rescue the weak and the poor from the grip of the wicked.” On Rosh Hashanah, just around the corner, say the Rabbis, “all who come into the world” (kol ba’ei olam) stand before God in judgment. We are all God’s people. We are charged with decency to all. Come Rosh Hashanah, we will stand with God at our side to ask if we are worthy of the covenant. If we do not speak up for a Judaism that values elemental human decency, the answer will be “No.”

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Posted in belief, Bible, Torah In Our Lives

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Denominations: The Final, Moral, Test

Posted on January 15, 2012 | 5 comments

In response to my blog decrying the premature obituary of religious denominations, I have received several emails that deserve response. Some readers charge me with unfairly championing Reform Judaism as the only successful merger of modernity and tradition. Others think I unfairly dismiss Orthodoxy as a monolithic premodern whole. Still others persist in thinking that denominations necessarily limit creativity. At the very least, others say, why not argue for a single denomination outside of Orthodoxy, giving us Orthodox on one hand and non-Orthodox on the other? These are very important critiques that require clarification. Let me take each in its turn.

1.      “I unfairly champion Reform Judaism as the only successful merger of modernity and tradition.”

I never said it and don’t believe it. All denominations today arose as responses to the challenge of remaining Jews in a modern world. So too, did Zionism and Jewish socialism, the strategies that were favored in eastern Europe where religious reform did not dominate Jewish consciousness as much as it did in the west. All Jews have had to wrestle with modernity and either affirm it or (at some psychic cost) deny it. I cited today’s Reform Judaism an exemplary instance of merging modernity and tradition, but there can be others.

2.      “I unfairly dismiss Orthodoxy as a monolithic whole that is inherently premodern.”

Not so. Modern Orthodoxy is exactly what its name implies: modern and Orthodox. Its preeminent German founder, Samson Raphael Hirsch shared a great deal with the reformers, including the conviction that he was at home in Germany, the desire for modern aesthetics in worship, and the conviction that chosen peoplehood implies a Jewish mission. To be sure, Hirsch faulted his likeminded Reform colleagues on other counts, but is he modern? Of course. Modern Orthodoxy has moved on significantly from its Hirschian origins, just as modern Reform has from its parallel German starting point, but by no means do I dismiss modern Orthodoxy as inferior, even though I, myself, have chosen to identify as Reform.

3.      “We would be better off with untrammeled creativity on the congregational level, but without denominations which limit it.”

It is not true that institutions necessarily protect the status quo. Renaissance art and Baroque music (for example) were supported by the establishment. Great inventiveness has arisen out of corporation-sponsored think tanks. Denominations can catalyze greatness by encouraging brilliance, supporting genius, and rewarding excellence.

4.      “Why not opt for a single denomination outside of Orthodoxy, so that we have Orthodox on one hand and non-Orthodox on the other?”

We live in a time of enormous personal choice and if denominations offer real options, people are more likely to identify with a particular type of Judaism than with Judaism in general. Jews insistent on traditionalist worship and a halakhic life-style will be drawn to Orthodoxy. Jews who care deeply about egalitarian worship, a tradition of prophetic ethics, and spirituality will be happiest in Reform. Other denominations can and should make their own claims to specificity. Because we cannot predict the kind of Judaism that any given person will seek, we need strong denominational addresses all along the Jewish spectrum.

I am, you see, very much a pluralist. I think we need pluralism to keep us sharp and competitive. Respectful denominational competition can be healthy. But as much as we should champion everyone else’s right to practice Judaism as they wish, we also have an obligation to identify deeply as our own kind of Jew. We should allow for many options but be passionate in supporting our own favored option.

5.      The moral argument

I say “everyone else’s right to practice Judaism as they wish.” But there are limits. Some interpretations of Judaism are beyond the pale, offensive to the point where we must say so. When, for example, a rabbi in Israel refuses to rent to a Muslim on prejudicial, even racial, grounds, we must all denounce his message as a kind of Judaism we will not tolerate. We should stand together in respecting the licit interpretations of Torah while denouncing the illicit ones.

That is another reason for denominations. In the normal course of things, be it politics, religion or life in general, the crazies always shout the loudest. How much impact can the reasoned opposition of several scattered synagogues have? Denominations, however, speak with the accumulated voice of many; they command attention in the press and media. We need their voice of sanity when Judaism is wrongly represented as other than it is.

Indeed, the moral test of denominations is precisely this. Are they willing to make their voice heard? Given the disturbing news from Israel of torched mosques, abused women, and trampled human rights, we are at the point where we are about to find out.

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Ya Gotta Believe — Something (Part 2)

Posted on May 15, 2011 | 5 comments

The most familiar statement of Jewish belief is the section of prayer we call the Sh’ma and its Blessings. The Sh’ma affirms the absolute oneness of God. But most major religions affirm monotheism, so accompanying the Sh’ma are three surrounding blessings that delineate the nature of this one God whom Jews affirm. We believe in a God who a) creates all things, b) reveals Torah to Israel, and c) promises redemption.

So far so good. But here’s the problem. The minute we make those statements, we are in danger of evoking an image of some old man who creates the universe the way Geppetto created Pinocchio; who dictated Torah to Moses the way Donald Trump instructs his executive assistant to “take a letter”; and a military genius who foiled the Egyptians at the Red Sea the way the Duke of Wellington beat Napoleon at Waterloo.

These are exactly the “humanized” versions of God that most moderns reject as childish. Is God some super combination of Geppetto, Trump and Wellington? Is creation like Pinocchio? The Torah like an executive memo? And the Red Sea like Waterloo?

Of course not. What we have is a liturgical set of metaphors for God, the rabbinic attempt to envision God in a way that would stretch people’s imagination. Ever since then, Jews have struggled with these metaphors, making them over into new ones of their own, if need be, so as to express the inexpressible essence of the Divine.

The best-known modern effort to do so avoids saying anything about God at all. Instead it names the processes in which God seems here to be engaged. God, we have been taught to say, is a God of creation, revelation, and redemption.

Again, so far so good. But literalists then try to translate process back into person. God, they conclude, is a creator, revealer and redeemer — which puts us back at square one, likening God to Geppetto, Trump and Wellington again. Besides, creation, revelation and redemption do not resonate for us the way they did for the nineteenth-century philosophers who came up with them. No one these days is likely to encounter a discussion on any one of them.

If we are to believe in anything sustainable, we require more up-to-date metaphors that capture best this three-fold insistence on creation, revelation and redemption; which are, therefore, equally true to the original intent of the prayers; but which speak to our time. I suggest a metaphor that combines time, space and history.

What astounds about the universe is the aesthetic and scientific miracle by which the finely-tuned network of natural law accords so beautifully with mathematics. For modern Jews, therefore, the doctrine of creation is best translated as the affirmation that the universe has pattern. It runs by an amazingly small set of universal laws that never ever fail.

Revelation describes our faith that this cosmic order is not without human purpose. We humans can matter in a grand scheme of which we know almost nothing but into which we have been thrust.

Redemption is the realization that over the long run, purpose within pattern gives us the right to hope.

Pattern, purpose and hope are the contemporary equivalents of creation, revelation and redemption. They sustain us on the tiny bridge of time called history.

If the age of the universe were a line in space equal to the distance from New York to Los Angeles, Jewish history since Abraham and Sarah would cover only ten feet, and human existence, prehistory and all, would encompass only part of a single span of the Golden Gate or George Washington Bridge. The Holocaust, therefore, in all its unspeakable horror, is insufficient to shatter optimism. The State of Israel is a similar, albeit positive, tiny step in time, an outpost of hope we must defend, but hardly a sign of imminent messianic victory, as some extremists imagine. Life is lived in the narrowness of bridge spans. Faith is the insistence that the bridge goes somewhere, connecting past and future in a present that has meaning.

For the bridge is not without direction. Creation pulses forward toward ever-increasing freedom. If God is the power behind universal pattern, the guarantor of purpose and the ground for hope, we can say, in short, that God (as it were) wants human freedom; has designed a universe that invites it; and summons Jews to champion it. The Jewish People’s moral purpose is to tell our story of servitude and freedom; to act it out in ritual that revives our vision and steels our nerve; and then, in all we do, to demonstrate our faith in freedom as the redemptive end of history.

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Posted in belief, liturgical insights, spirituality, theology

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