>

This simultaneous longing for and suspicion of the miraculous, of the transcendent exception that breaks through the cracks in the real, is not at all alien to the classical roots of the Jewish tradition. Indeed, this appreciation for the possibilities of the miraculous while at the same time holding it at arm’s length might be said to characterize the fundamental metaphysical attitude of rabbinic Judaism. Witness to the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans, the rabbis of the classical period must have felt themselves to be walking an exceedingly fine line. On the one hand, the Temple’s destruction must have stood before them always as an object lesson that history will exercise its harsh prerogatives even at the expense of what is most holy. And yet, to give up on the notion of G-d’s providential intervention in the historical world, to shut the door on the realm of the miraculous, would cut off the Jewish people from its own living roots, dooming Judaism to become a philosopher’s religion, filled perhaps with sound advice on matters of ethics but fundamentally closed to the the genuine, vital encounter with the divine that lies at the heart of religious experience and points the way to the possibility of future redemption. This is why the rabbis, though occasionally anxious to curb the wildest outpourings of mystical enthusiasm, were always careful never to repudiate it utterly.

Simeon ben Shatah said to him, “If you were not Honi, I should decree a ban of excommunication against you. But what am I going to do to you? For you importune before the Omniscient, so He does what you want, like a son who importunes his father, so he does what he wants.”

As presented in the story, at no point is the efficacy of Honi’s unconventional methods questioned. He claims to be able to basically whine until the Almighty gives him what he wants, and for all intents and purposes this claim seems to be accurate. And yet, far from being welcomed, Honi is sharply criticized by his fellow rabbis for his unorthodox methods and the disrespect they seem to imply. In the end, it is only the level of prestige Honi commands in the rabbinic community that saves him from the fate of excommunication. Certainly one could argue that what we are dealing with here is the suspicion that Honi is perpetrating some kind of hoax, making use of some mundane or magical trick and passing it off as a genuine miracle. I think, however, that what is actually at issue here is the miracle itself, regarded as such.

To put it bluntly, the rabbis are not displeased with the miracle itself, but with its possible social consequences. The danger here is that the people will come away with the wrong message–that the Almighty’s favor can be had for the asking, and that the mark of this favor can be easily determined by the trail of wondrous occurrences that follow the self-proclaimed prophet. But the entire rabbinic enterprise is founded on a rejection of this overly-simplistic mystical worldview. The rabbis of the classical period were, after all, the intellectual descendants of extremely pragmatic men–men resolved, in the face of tragedy and disaster to take what they could get, cut their losses and above all to preserve what they could of the dedicated core of the Jewish tradition and keep it alive for the sake of future generations. This is to be expected and praised–in the world of the early Common Era, a Jewish people that waited calmly in the expectation of a miraculous solution to the problems of the day would have ceased ultimately to exist, massacred and scattered by the might of the Roman legions.

Okay, I’m posting this before it gets any longer. Feel free to comment.

I think it’s impossible to be a Jew in this day and age and not be uncomfortable with some aspect of the prayer service. The way the siddur is constructed–layer upon layer of songs, devotional literature, biblical and talmudic passages representing virtually every period of Jewish history and every school of Jewish thought–is such as to virtually guarantee this. Each of us probably has a passage that gives them pause, which they find themselves either hesitating before reading or discretely skipping over. For me, at least, it’s prayers having to do with restoration of the temple sacrifice. Which is a pity, actually, since on the whole I find the general idea of a universally redemptive messianic age compelling, and this is one of the primary forms these sentiments tend to take in our liturgy.

But that’s a subject for another post. Today I want to take a look at a passage from the second paragraph of the Shema:

I will give rain in your land in its season, the early and the late rain; and you shall gather in your grain, wine and oil. I will give grass in your field for your cattle, and you shall eat and be satisfied. Be careful lest your heart be tempted and you go astray and worship other gods, bowing down to them. Then the LORD’s anger will flare against you and He will close the heavens and there will be no rain. The land will not yield its crops, and you will perish swiftly from the good land that the LORD is giving you. (translation from the Koren-Sachs Siddur, which is the one I tend to use at the moment)

The connection between obedience and reward, disobedience and punishment, in this passage is so clear-cut and unambiguous that it might make us uncomfortable. How do we reconcile this promised with the many, many examples of undeserved suffering we encounter every day, in the pages of history, in the news and in our own lives? One might be tempted to mentally classify it as the artifact of an earlier, more primitive understanding of G-d and His relationship and creation, holding little relevance for us today.

I think the best way to make sense of this is to examine the differences between this passage and the first paragraph that precedes it. This comparison is especially useful because these passages are so similar. They come from the same part of Deuteronomy, only a few chapters apart, and yet both in terms of content and of language used they are virtually identical. It’s easy to wonder why the framers of this section of liturgy found it necessary to incorporate both passages. The two significant differences between the two are that:

1. The second paragraph incorporates the passage promising prosperity in return for obedience and threatening punishment for disobedience. The first does not.
2. Grammatically, the first paragraph is written in the second person singular whereas the second is in the second person plural.

Point B doesn’t come across so well in translation since modern English lacks a 2nd person plural, but it’s important to my understanding of what is at work here. The first paragraph addresses itself to the individual, and in it I am commanded to love and serve G-d, to obey His commandments, to teach and remember them. Conspicuously absent is any mention of reward for such behavior. The second paragraph addresses not I, the individual, but the people as a collective body, but otherwise contains much the same set of injunctions, expressed in a virtually identical way. It is only here, however, that mention is made of any positive benefit associated with performance of the mitzvot. 

I think there’s a sort of brutal honesty to be found here: Individually, it seems to say, I may lead a moral life and suffer while others behave wickedly and prosper. This, while hard to come to terms with, is indisputably true and speaks to our experience of life and history. The more important point, however, is that collectively we can draw a link between morality and prosperity that does not hold true on the individual level. 

An overly simplistic reading of this text might lead us to believe that society has little vested interest in caring for the poor, the sick, or the outsiders because we can ultimately trust G-d to reward those who deserve His favor. But we already know that this cannot be the case, as it conflicts with the positive commandments to be found throughout the Torah to feed the stranger, the widow and the orphan, to take care of the sick. 

I think the actual message being communicated to us here is precisely the reverse: The Holy One, it is saying, does not guarantee that the good will be rewarded and the wicked suffer in this world. Why this is so we do not and cannot know, but sometimes we may be called on to carry on being moral despite circumstances that seem to actively punish such behavior. But because this is so, that makes it doubly important for us a society to take care of the less fortunate. 

In Pirke Avo there’s a passage that talks about four kinds of human beings. The first one mentioned is the one who says “What is mine is mine, what is yours is yours.” This kind of human, say the sages, is the normal kind of person, “though some say that this is the Sodom kind.” The message here is, I think, that a society conceived solely in terms of self interest will quickly devolve from the merely selfish to the truly hellish. By working to create a just society (conceived in Jewish terms as one that reflects the ethical vision embodied in the Torah), we are acting in partnership with G-d to fill the moral gaps we encounter in the world. And by doing so, we are actually helping ourselves more than any kind of narrowly-defined self-interest could hope to promise. 

>

>Just read an article by Jay Michaelson on the Jewish Daily Forward website titled “The Myth of Authenticity.” His basic point is that an “unstated assumption” runs through a lot of our discourse about the various groups staking their claims within contemporary Judaism, that “real Judaism” is characterized by fidelity to a certain image of Orthodox traditionalism and all other forms of Jewish identity must be judged by their relationship to this ostensibly “authentic” Judaism. As he puts it,

…there persists in the American Jewish imagination an anxiety of inauthenticity — that someone, somewhere, is the real Jew, but I’m not it.

When you’re a convert to a religion (I imagine it must be similar for those who’ve immigrated to and become citizens of a country not of their birth), the question of authenticity is one that tends to cause you to lose quite a bit of sleep. Lacking a sense of identity grounded in birth and upbringing, you are thrown back upon your own religious practice as the sole signifier of belongingness to the chosen group. In theory, this should not be much of an issue in Judaism, given the halachic principle that converts are to be regarded in all respects as having actually been born as Jews. What convert has not drawn comfort from the rabbinical pronouncement that all Jews, past, present and future, were equally present at the giving of the Law at Sinai? Nevertheless, in practical terms things are rarely ever that simple, and in light of heated debate both in the US and in Israel concerning the status of conversions performed by the various movements one can hardly be blamed for occasionally yearning for a bit of simple, incontrovertible “authenticity.”

What Michaelson’s article reminds us of is that this concern regarding the authenticity of one’s own Judaism is hardly a phenomenon unique to the convert. Indeed, it might be said that the central question of contemporary Judaism is that of who can “speak” for Judaism in its true, essential character. Michaelson takes the view that this concern with authenticity is ultimately mythical, “a false projection of particular historical quirks onto an imagined ideal of “realness” that artificially freezes culture, and thus spells its demise.” In his opinion, an authentic Judaism is quite simply one that resonates meaningfully to the individual. While I agree with him that progressive strains of Judaism must ultimately reject the attempt to portray them as a “watered-down,” “less authentic” or “more secular” version of neo-Orthodoxy, I wonder if his ultimate rejection of the very question of authenticity  doesn’t end up ignoring the root of the problem, rather than addressing it.

The question that concerns me in this regard is a simple one, but unfortunately lacking in any kind of simple answer: Are we approaching a point where maintaining even the polite fiction of the Jews as a unified people will become impossible? In response to the challenges and opportunities presented by modernity, a variety of new responses began to develop, from the strict traditionalism of Neo-Orthodoxy to the rather abstract ethical monotheism of classical Reform, from the Zionist understanding of Judaism as a national community united by language and custom to the renewed emphasis in some quarters on its fundamentally religious character. In light of the proliferation of conflicting definitions of what it means to be a Jew, it becomes all the more important for the different camps to cling fast to the bedrock of common courtesy of good faith which would recognize at least the legitimate place of the different points of view at the table.

>