Yom Ha Shoah

It’s four in the morning, and we’ve been back for a while from our one o’clock shift reading names at our congregation's Yom Ha Shoah observance. I’m here at the computer because I can’t sleep. Partly, the insomnia is the result of the nap I took from ten to midnight, to be sure I didn’t nod off at the bima in the middle of my sequence. But, of course, it’s a lot more than that. Participating in this event was a spiritual cup of coffee. It’s going to take a while to come down from the emotion and passion of the experience. May take days.

I particularly sought out a late night shift because this really does have the feel of a night time ritual. And, yes, it is a ritual, not a memorial, a political statement or anything else; it’s a religious ritual. What we have going on at our congregation right now is a twenty four hour prayer, an elongated Kaddish, particularly like the Kaddish in its dirgeful tones and simultaneous affirmation of life. Unlike a standard Kaddish, however, this one seems more appropriate for a small group, not a minyan. I think it would have detracted from the moment to have had more than one or two listeners in attendance. Perhaps a ritual commemorating the destruction of a community should be that way.

Earlier in the evening, on the way home from dinner on Seventh Avenue, we stopped off to hear about an hour’s worth of names. How strange it is, as Rabbi Andy suggested, to be thinking about names in temporal units – “name years,” “light years,” “darkness years” – whatever. As I sat there listening to the varying cadences of the several readers, my mind wandered through a series of peculiar images. For a while, as one of the readers got up a head of steam, I found myself on a long train ride listening to the rhythmic chugging of the locomotive. It doesn’t take a Freud to figure out that one. For another few moments, I was at rock concert during an interminable drum solo, maybe Ginger Baker playing “Toad.” As I listened, just as I would at a real concert, I questioned myself – do I really want this to continue or do I want to get back to the guitars already? Through other moments, I found myself hoping for a name with a familiar ring, a “Fainsod,” “Rosenthal,” “Greenberg” or “Mancuta,” some long-lost great aunt, uncle or cousin with whom I might share the most fleeting of I-Thou encounters. It didn’t happen, and yet there was a sweetness to go with the sadness in simply thinking about it.

It was hard to leave when we finished our parshah. We felt compelled, as the reader before us seemed to, to stay a few minutes to maintain the continuity. It reminded me of another ritual on the bima, when we stay in place for the next aliyah. That always seemed so appropriate, and now I think I understand why. I still can’t fall asleep. I’m thinking about going back to the sanctuary, but at the same time I know I shouldn’t. It’s someone else’s turn to be the minyan and I don’t want to interfere. What a powerful experience this has been.

My Problem With Pesah

My maternal grandfather, the product of a 19th Century orthodox education but later also the gymnasium, purported to cast off religion at the age of 25, during a physics lecture. Yet, sometimes it seemed that his hostility to Judaism was a little forced. Although I’m convinced that he ceased to believe in any kind of god, I’m not as certain that he rejected the whole package.

There was at least an ambivalence that had a funny way of manifesting itself around Passover. I say ambivalence because if he had simply not cared any longer, I don’t think he would have made such a fuss. But like clockwork, moments before the start of each year’s first-night Seder, a war would break out. Grandpa Moses (as I fittingly knew him) would denounce Moshe Rabbenu as a “dictator.” My grandmother would respond with the non-sequitur, “Vos has de Moses?” (“What do you have against Moses?”). This would prompt gales of laughter from my mother and her brothers, my uncles and aunts.

At the time, I was too young to appreciate the humor of the moment. To be honest, I’m not even sure the recollection is my own or something I’ve internalized, having heard the story so many times. Either way, it comes to me every year around this time, almost as a Pesah ritual. As I’ve gotten older, however, a certain bitter-sweetness has infused this cherished family memory. For, like my grandfather, I also feel ambivalent about Pesah.

To be blunt about it, Passover makes me uncomfortable. The Passover holiday, and liturgy surrounding it, are inextricably intertwined with the concept of freedom. Indeed, it’s fair to say that freedom is one of the founding principles of the Jewish religion and Nation. Yet, I believe that there is a Jewish principle even more important than freedom, one that is primary to freedom and, without which, freedom is no more than an illusion. That principle is the truth, Emes.

The truth is primary to freedom because living a free life includes being honest and truthful with oneself. A person who lives according to myths or unfounded assumptions is being dishonest in a fundamental way. In that condition, it is easy to become a slave to those myths. And, of course, slavery and freedom are incompatible.

If we’re honest with ourselves, the Passover tradition is incompatible with reverence for the truth. Archaeology has raised serious questions about the premise that the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt or that they left Egypt in a mass wave. That, in itself, would seem to preclude the revelation at Sinai, since the Bible portrays them as parts of a seamless story. But even assuming that the exodus actually happened, what about revelation? Who really believes that the law, the abundant law in all its rich detail, really came to the Israelites in this way? And, indeed, the rabbinic tradition is full of midrashic alternatives to the incredible concept of a God conveying a prolix code to a single man, who then bestowed it on his followers.

The dependence on an elaborate myth as a founding moment of Judaism is surely a part of my discomfort with Pesah. The rest of the year, I can ignore it if I want to. But this time of year, the myth becomes a matter of religious ritual that’s hard to avoid. Yet, there has to be more to my Passover malaise than that. After all, as a non-believer I’m confronted on a weekly basis with a ritual that I don’t accept literally. Participation in the Shabbat ritual, nonetheless, holds great meaning for me. Something about the Pesah message doesn’t sit right with me.

So let me return to the Sinai revelation. The Sinai tradition posits a special entitlement to a piece of land in return for fealty to God’s principles. The contract, however, wasn’t offered to everyone, only the Chosen. In other words, the entitlement stems from a particular national and religious affiliation. In other contexts, many of us would be extremely uncomfortable with such a policy.

The sense of entitlement central to the Exodus tradition is not only unflattering, but destructive of our values. For even as the tradition symbolizes our love of our own freedom, it may blind us to the parallel, but apparently incompatible, yearnings of other national movements. We can start with the Canaanites, but more to the point is the dismissive attitude too many Jews have manifested toward the nationality most recently indigenous to that piece of land, the Palestinians. Passover makes a holiday and a ritual out of that dismissive attitude.

But it’s not my purpose here to go political on Passover because my problem with it is of a more fundamental nature. It’s not simply the Israeli-Palestinian conflict echoing in the background; more to the point is the general sense of entitlement manifested in the Exodus story and Pesah’s attendant rituals. Much as I’ve tried to think of Passover as a holiday steeped in universal themes and values, it’s actually the most particular of Jewish holidays.

In the past, Yom Kippur was the holiday that caused me spiritual and ideological difficulties. I found the expression of boilerplate prayers of contrition a completely artificial exercise. I’m still not comfortable with the breast-beating aspect of Yom Kippur, but that’s really not what the holiday, at its core, is about. Asking God for forgiveness at Yom Kippur time is a ritual, but the performance of teshuva (approaching another individual in contrition) is an act of personal accountability and humility. By contrast, Passover’s celebration of the Exodus and revelation myths represents an of absence of national accountability and humility on the part of the Jewish People.

So what do I think should be done with Pesah? Left to my own devices, I might take a break for a few years, let it air out and take another look with the benefit of reflection. But, of course, that’s not realistic since, first of all, nobody is going to do it and, second, there is the small matter of the Torah’s command to celebrate the festival every year. That, in itself, is an impossible tradition to buck.

Nonetheless, Torah doesn’t require that our seders be annual exercises in triumphalism. Though the Exodus is a central biblical story, like anything else in the Hebrew bible it is subject to reevaluation and interpretation. Unfortunately, many have already tried and failed at that. One year, we read passages from Bennie Morris’s “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.” Then there are the “environmental” seders, the oranges on the seder plate and all the rest of the symbolic gestures toward making the ritual more “relevant.” It’s all window dressing.

Humility, honesty and a reverence for the truth are values most successfully pursued by individuals in their every day interactions, not on a community wide level. But Pesah is first and foremost a celebration about community, a particular community, not the obligations of individuals. How to infuse a holiday whose central theme is the victory of a particular Nation with the sacred values we demand from ourselves as individuals is a paradox that seems harder and harder to solve every year.

Friday Night z'l

The synagogue to which I belong is about to embark on a daring experiment. It’s called “Shabbat.” It appears that there are two related components to the experiment. The first is the shrinking in importance of Friday night services, until now the primary congregational worship event each week. The second is the revitalization of Saturday morning as, well, the primary weekly worship experience.

While I’m ambivalent about the change affecting Friday night, I believe that our rabbinic leadership should be given the scope to try this experiment. Depending on what happens to Saturday mornings, I could see myself becoming a semi-regular. In the short term, I’ll certainly miss the convenience and familiarity of Friday night as I’ve known it, but who knows? I don’t want to make my mind up before this all gets started.

There is one part of this changeover that concerns me and that has to do with the more general concept of Shabbat itself. The implicit assumption in the change seems to be that Reform Jews should observe the sabbath in a more traditional Jewish way. If this means giving up the routines I’ve established on Saturdays throughout my adult life, I’m not sure that I see the point. I understand that according to tradition shabbat is supposed to be a day of rest, withdrawal from the hubbub of daily life and reflection. But what if these values don’t appeal to me? What if my best way of relaxing is to do errands, coach little league, spend money in the neighborhood and enjoy my time away from the daily grind in my own way?I don’t want to be made to feel guilty that my own routines don’t fit the strict definition of the Jewish sabbath. Indeed, to feel that way would defeat the purpose of the weekend for me and cause me to feel resentment, not the kind of contentment that shabbat is supposed to engender.

We all find our Buberian moments in our own ways, and some of my favorite ones would have conflicted with Saturday morning services, whether it was teaching my son to throw a fastball in the park or getting a haircut at the Park Slope Barber Shop. These activities may seem mundane to some, but that’s the thing about a Buberian moment. You don’t know where you’re going to find it. It’s a very personal thing.

I don’t expect anyone to tell me that I’m doing the wrong thing by enjoying Saturday as I see fit. Nobody is going to be that heavy handed. Yet, a judgment about the worth of my kind of weekend activities also seems to be implicit in our remodeling of shabbat. The obvious implication is that one is supposed to be in Temple Saturday morning and involved in only certain kind of activities the rest of the day. There is an additional implication that we reformers have been shamming all these years by trying to cram our sabbath obligations into Friday night. I don’t feel I’ve been shamming.

Give Me That Old Time Religion

I attended services at another congregation this morning. I won’t identify it because at least that way I’m limiting the lashon ha-ra. I feel kind of finky writing about my experience, because the occasion was the bar mitzvah of the son of a dear friend. With that in mind, maybe this entry is best read as an appreciation of my own congregation in Brooklyn.

This was a Saturday morning “bar mitzvah service” in a Reform congregation, so perhaps it’s an unfair sample. But what I saw, and I emphasize saw, reminded me more of a Broadway musical than a participatory religious service. The cantor had a lovely voice and that’s about all I can say for her. Alongside its ritual, cultural and legal traditions, Judaism has a rich musical tradition as well. I had no sense that any of that has made an impression on this cantor. It could have been a performance of the Lion King just as well as a Shabbas morning services. Even worse than the cantor herself was what I’ll call the musical staging. Good liturgical music is kind of like good umpiring. Done well, it adds greatly to the experience, but you don’t want to notice it too much. And if you notice it a lot, there’s probably something wrong.

Unfortunately, I was aware of the music in a negative way at every point in the service. It started with unnecessary background music as we were invited to introduce ourselves to our neighbors in the pews, proceeded with the cantor’s showy -- and unnecessary -- crescendos, and culminated with the vocal and instrumental overlay as the rabbi conferred his benediction on the bar mitzvah. The benediction was a show in itself. We had the distinct impression that the rabbi, whom we couldn’t possibly hear over the music, exaggerated his gesticulations in conjunction with the music to create a visual mood. The scene had the quality of one of those theatrical segments from the Ed Sullivan Show, except with Ed would have given us Zero Mostel, the choreography of Jerome Robbins and the cast of Fiddler.

Perhaps I’m out of line criticizing a congregation to which I’ll probably never return. This is a community that’s been around for more than 150 years and appears to be on top of its game. Still, I’m glad I belong to a place where the commitment to continuity with the tradition is more apparent. That can mean a lot of things – more commentary on the texts, more authenticity in the ritual, more of an effort to promote participation and maybe most important more judgment about bringing secularity into a religious service. I’m all for a rabbi speaking out, and forcefully, on the important ethical issues of our times. And if this sometimes means politics, so be it. The ability to connect modern issues to our ethical and textual traditions may be rabbinics at its best. What we got this morning, however, was an extended talk about Gerry Ford’s legacy (and to be fair also about Teddy Kollek, although the forced comparison between the two really rang wrong).

The rabbi where I daven has a multitude of talents, but one of the things I like most about him is the sense of community he constantly engenders. By this, I mean both our immediate community in Brooklyn, and the community of the ages inherited by every generation of Jews. I didn’t have any sense of that this morning. It was just a little too slick.

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.

More on Atheism

A rabbinic friend of mine and liberal Protestant minister in my neighborhood have been discussing the issue atheism on another blog I regularly read. The discussion is being fueled by a couple of books in the current intellectual literature. Since I normally don’t like to comment on books I haven’t read, I won’t name the books or authors. Suffice it to say that the books, at least by report, seem to feature a style of bright-lights atheism that practically exalts non-belief to a religion of its own, not a very appealing theology as far as I’m concerned. To me, the more interesting question, then, is where to fit the atheist who isn’t doing it for the power or the glory or some other base motive, but simply hasn’t been convinced by the God argument. As indicated in a previous post ("Tsimtsum Atheism), God isn’t a concept that I entertain in my life, certainly no God north of Spinoza’s or Kaplan’s, which is to say no kind of God worth his or her salt. Presumably, this means that I’m not currently receiving any of God’s mercy, and if I am I probably should be feeling sheepish about it. And, yet, I believe with all my heart that the Torah belongs to me as much as it does to you believers. I study it, I cherish it and I think good things come from it. But it hasn’t brought me faith, the sustaining quality of being a believer in God. Instead, the Torah has reaffirmed doubt for me as a guiding principle, faith’s polar opposite. After all, the Hebrew Bible is all about moral quandaries, and what is a quandary if not an expression of doubt? The principle of doubt tells me not to accept anything on faith, but to require proof and justification. So far, no book, no argument, no natural phenomenon and, certainly, very little in the history of humanity has provided me with proof that God exists – quite the opposite. So, I’d like you to know from my friends in the clergy where that leaves me, because my non-belief seems to be a bigger issue for them than it is for me. Can you believers accept a non-believer as a fellow-traveler of sorts, or are we atheists doomed to eternal traifness in your theology? And if we are, my next question is whose Torah is it anyway, because I really feel that I have as much invested in it as you do.

Tsimtsum Atheism

Tsimtsum, a concept from Jewish mysticism, holds that at the moment of creation God withdrew to make room for the universe. The principle of Tsimtsum has a kind of symmetry that I find appealing, but at first blush it wouldn’t seem to have any relevance for modern liberal Jewish theology. Yet, in my own theological musings, as an atheist, I’ve found not only relevance, but great comfort in Tsimtsum. Of course, it isn’t God that withdraws in my personal system of Tsimtsum, but non-belief itself. Now don’t get me wrong, I continue to be a non-believer. It’s just that by virtue of Tsimtsum, non-belief has become far less important. Should it shrink to the infinitesimal stature of a point, it will withdraw no further. It’s never going to disappear altogether, but what certainly is happening is that it’s ceasing to be in the way. With the shrinkage of atheism in my personal theology, I feel freer to pursue the mitzvot, the legal/ethical obligations, mandated for Jews by the Torah. When atheism was King, rather than a shrinking point, I always felt the need to justify any observance of the mitzvot. The Tsimtsum-ing of atheism in my life has had the effect of alleviating such feelings of guilt. Now, don’t get me wrong again. While Tsimtsum may mean not having to say I’m sorry any more for a life tending towards Jewish observance, it doesn’t mean shedding my critical faculties either, cardinal Jewish values in their own right. Tsimstum atheism doesn’t demand that these values to be relegated to the dust bin of Jewish theology, only that a comfortable intellectual construction consistent with observance and non-belief is available to those modern liberal Jews for whom the concept of God has no meaning, but most everything else about Judaism does.