Red & Religious

In the last year or so, I’ve been getting involved again in political activism. At the same time, I’ve become more and more involved in Jewish life, particularly in Jewish studies. So on the one hand, it seems that I’m being pulled by the radical political passions of my youth, which seemed to end with the conclusion of the Viet Nam war. On the other, my even longer roots of Jewish observance are tugging at me.

It’s a puzzlement because in the red family in which I grew up, the implicit assumption was that you couldn’t have religion and left politics together. My paternal grandfather had been raised in the orthodox tradition, but claimed to have lost his faith at the age of 25 in an apocalyptic moment of anti-spiritualism during a physics lecture. He didn’t quite become a Bolshevik, but certainly was a less radical socialist. By contrast, my grandmother became more and more observant as she grew older, influenced by devastating effect of the Shoah on a large swatch of our family in eastern Europe. Religion, thereby, became a bone of contention between these two aging Jews who had split ideologically and spiritually like a fork in a road.

My parents’ generation tended toward the radical, anti-religious attitude of my grandfather, indeed, even more so. Most of my own generation inherited the assumption that one could be religious or red, but not both at the same time. To my surprise, however, I’m not finding this dichotomy so clear anymore. I’ve been studying Torah for the last few years, which in the more general sense of the term means the Five Books of Moses plus the greater rabbinic literature. But lately, I’ve had the insight that perhaps I’ve been here before. In my teens, I devoted a significant amount of time to the study of Marxist literature, culminating with the three volumes of Das Kapital, Marx’s magnum opus. In retrospect, my absorption in Marxist intellectualism may have constituted a kind of proto-Torah study. Granted, it’s a big, big stretch to bring Das Kapital within the rabbinic tradition. And yet, I think there’s a valid metaphor at work. Because I’m not so much talking about the substance of the Marxist works I consumed as a youth, as the mind-set that I brought to the enterprise.

The same drive that I presently feel for knowledge and truth in my study of the rabbinic writings undoubtedly underlay my radical studies as a teen and a young man. The conundrum that I've only recently resolved is how I can be feeling the pull of my ancestral Jewish religious roots and my youthful political activism at the same time. I just never would have thought that the two could co-exist – the religious and the political. Look at the grandparents, look at the parents, the aunts and the uncles – it was always one or the other.

The rabbis tell us that there is no incongruity at all in what I’m experiencing. We Jews speak of ours as a religion of deeds, meaning that for an observant religious life a commitment to repairing the world is mandatory, not optional. In that sense, engagement with the political in conjunction with the religious is a perfect fit. This very logical line of reasoning seems to harmonize these two urges that I thought for so long were mutually exclusive. At least for now, this fusion of my two spiritual selves has a comfortable feel to it. I think I’ll continue to pursue it and see where it goes.