beliefs « Rejewvenate!

Back to the Future with Jonathan Sarna

August 13, 2009 at 6:41 pm | In beliefs, culture, dating and marriage, economics, education, israel, orthodox, politics | Leave a Comment

The more I read of Jonathan Sarna, the more impressed I am with him personally, but the more I fear for institutional Judaism. Sarna is intelligent, considered, insightful and articulate, but he’s also an historian, and my feeling is that movements led by historians and sociologists rather than activists and entrepreneurs are already moving into their exhibit space at the museum.

I bring this up to comment on Sarna’s recent article in Reform Judaism Online, published by the URJ. Sarna has some thoughts to share looking backwards, and a few predictions for the future Judaism, inlcuding:

In the past, economic crises have caused American Judaism to turn inward and away from Israel and its troubles. It has also gutted educational spending, with terrible consequence.
Jewish institutional life tends to benefit from expansions in government services and social safety nets, as these free up significant funds and manpower for Jewish charities and social service organizations.
Expect to see lots of Jewish organizations go under, particularly in the hard-hit Orthodox sector, as we finally learn whose been swimming naked as the tide goes out. Mergers between Jewish instutions will increase, as will mergers between Jewish and non-Jewish institutions.

He’s got quite a few others, but I particularly want to focus on Dr. Sarna’s prediction that, as in the 1930s, American Judaism will turn inwards, and disengage to some extent with Israel. As evidence, Sarna cites the fact that fewer Jews are attending summer-long or semester-long programs in Israel.

My main objection to that piece of evidence is that it discounts Birthright Israel, which has sent over 200,000 Jews to Israel over the last decade. Much of the decline in summer and semester programs in Israel can be attributed to the fact that participants in those trips are ineligible for a Birthright tour, and many high-school students in particular have declined to go to Israel with their youth movements, synagogues, or schools precisely because they prefer to go on Birthright for free.

In any case, Sarna also points out that entirely endogamous Jewish couples are outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 by intermarried couples. If roughly 50 out of 100 Jews marry other Jews, you get 25 endogamous couples. That leaves another 50 Jews marrying 50 non-Jews, and thus you get that 2-to-1 ratio that is simply astonishing. Judaism in America has already been redefined on the ground, and we’re still left sorting out exactly what that might mean.

Aliyah Guilt

August 6, 2009 at 7:38 pm | In beliefs, culture, israel, politics | 12 Comments

On a recent trip to Israel I met up with an Israeli couple for dinner in Jerusalem. They are old family friends who raised three boys in Efrat, one of the early settlements around Jerusalem, east of the Green Line. As always, conversation was lively and interesting, but one topic stays with me still. The husband turned to me at one point and asked “ How do American Jews deal with their guilt over not living in Israel?”

The question took me by surprise. At first, I thought that maybe it was just because my friend is, well, a settler, a right-wing religious Zionist who believes that a Jew’s place is in the Biblical land of Israel. Nonetheless, the expectation that American Jews actually feel guilty about not living in Israel seemed a bit extreme, even for someone the media might characterize as an extremist.

I realized quickly that my friend was not alone, and his opinion was not extreme, it was in the mainstream. The ideology of Zionism had no room for a Diaspora, because Zionism redefined Jewish identity as a national identity, bound to a land. Early Zionists, and even not-so-early Zionists fully expected that the Jews of the Diaspora would flock, en masse, to the Jewish State. It took at least two decades after the birth of Israel for the realization to set in that the Diaspora was likely a permanent feature of the Jewish community.

In recent years, the Jewish Agency has come under criticism for not doing its job well, for being inefficient and bureaucratic, and for losing its way now that the mass immigrations of Russian and Ethiopian Jews are complete. My criticism cuts even deeper. Why should the Jewish Agency be encouraging and incentivizing Aliyah at all? There’s a huge difference between rescuing Jewish communities under threat and trying to convince Jews who are comfortable and secure in their Diaspora communities to move to Israel. It’s not like Aliyah attracts enough people to have any real impact on the demographic struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. Moreover, Aliyah as currently structured gives incentive to those who have the least to contribute to the State and the most to take from it. Still, most Israelis remain enthusiastic about supporting Aliyah, even as most Americans are unmoved by the prospect.

I think that both Israeli and American Jews have lost their sense of purpose. In the Zionist narrative, Israel was a solution the problem of Jewish oppression in the Diaspora. The vision for the state itself was to be a nation like any other. American Jews are not so attracted to that narrative because they already live in a place where they feel safe from oppression, and where they are able to fully participate politically and culturally in the life of the nation. What’s the point of Israel? Sure, the land is important, but there are nearly 6 million Jews living in it already. What kind of personal responsibility should an American Jew feel in such a case?

Israel, in turn, looks to America and expects Americans to feel a sense of guilt for not living in Israel,, because such feelings of guilt would validate the Israeli national project. But even among Israelis, the certainty about why Israel exists and what purpose it is meant to serve has faded. Many Israelis emigrate, seeking a safer, easier, less tense life. Why live in existential crisis every moment, says this new breed of Israelis? What’s so important about Israel that it is worth all that sacrifice?

I believe that the state of Judaism and Jewish identity is at a moment of great uncertainty. The Zionist narrative is threatened and confused, and its ideological power is waning. But in America, assimilation threatens Jewish identity in lockstep with fading support for and relationship to Israel. The American vision of Tikun Olam and ethical monotheism had strongly influenced American culture, but at the cost, perhaps, of its power as a Jewish identity. I believe that Israel and America need each other, and that they need a shared narrative that dignifies both communities. Both America and Israel need flourishing and vibrant communities, seized with vision and creativity. We need a shared sense of purpose, a shared language, and a shared future. To get there, we will need to step back from all the old expectations and assumptions and open new dialogues, but most importantly, we’ll need to ask ourselves the hardest questions: Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is the next chapter of the Jewish story that we’d like to tell?

Why?

July 30, 2009 at 12:10 pm | In beliefs, culture, holidays, israel, jewish denominations, politics, tisha b'av | 2 Comments

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? All around the Jewish Internet, and around the Jewish world, we are asking “Why?” I asked “Why?” last year too. Why do we mourn on Tisha B’Av? What relevance does it have today? Who wants a Third Temple anyway?

Traditionally, we believe that both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on Tisha B’av, hundreds of years apart, the First for idolatry, and the Second for baseless hatred among Jews.

Though we typically say that the First Temple was destroyed because of our sin of idolatry, the idolatry of the day was not a matter of private worship. Religion was an organizing principle of government, social interaction, law, and ritual practice. To worship Molech meant to immolate young children. To worship Ashera meant to participate in orgiastic rape rituals with temple slaves. Idolatry was really a matter of competing lifestyles and ideologies, of competing sects seeking to define Israelite life, culture, and worship.

The same is true of life in the Second Temple. Hellenists, Jewish Christians, Sadducees, Pharisees, Sicarii, Zealots, Essenes, and other sects were characteristic of a highly fragmented social, political and religious milieu. These groups fought between and among themselves, to devastating consequences. But the question remains, why do we call this baseless hatred (Sina’at Hinam) ? The ideological differences between these groups were massive! Issues at stake including how many gods were to be worshipped, whether god was corporeal, what was the role of written text of Torah versus oral traditions of Torah, was religious leadership hereditary or earned, what was the appropriate practice of the Sabbath, and who controlled the Jewish calendar. There’s nothing baseless about the bitter rivalries and conflicts that played out over these issues!

A further question. On Tisha B’av we mourn the destruction of the Temple because the Temple was supposedly the symbol of Jewish unity. Yet the Temple was the very site of the political and religious power struggles described above. The Talmud is replete with stories about violent confrontations and devious machinations occurring in the Temple itself. The building that was destroyed, Herod’s Temple, was an enormously controversial project when Herod, considered and Edomite non-Jew and Roman puppet by many of his subjects, built it only a few decades prior to its destruction. I can mourn over Jewish hatred, but why mourn the destruction of the very forum in which they played out? It took the destruction of the Temple for Jews to consolidate and unite around Rabbinic Judaism, which sustained it for 2000 years!

In the last 2000 years, Tisha B’av has become a catch-all day of mourning. Kinot (mournful poems) are recited for the Crusades, pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust. The last, in particular, has become an important part of the modern Tisha B’av, because it is both so enormous in scale and so recent as to be quite relevant and relatable. People can still find tears for the Holocaust that they cannot find for a 2000-year old Temple ruin. But the problem with Tisha B’av as a Holocaust memorial is that first question I asked, “Why?”. We have reasons for the destruction of our Temples, but what reason do we have for the Holocaust? Last year, I wrote:

We are still mad from the Holocaust. We can find no meaning in it, we are estranged from God, from ourselves, and from our destiny because of it. We drink in all of its memories, we recite very name, stare at every photo, and listen to every story, but we never master it. We cannot bring ourselves to name its causes, to assign responsibility for it, or to reframe our relationship to God around it. And until we don’t change that, the creeping numbness that inflicts us every Tisha B’Av will grow, the distance between our values, our work, our God, and ourselves will lengthen, and we will become a faceless, speechless people with no lesson for the world but silence.

This year, I will try to formulate the beginning of a response.

The Temple is understood as a symbol of unity, even if in practical terms that unity proved elusive. Yet that unity is expressed in some contradictory ways.

The Temple is meant to be a house of worship for all people and nations, but its precincts are restricted. Non-Jews could not enter the main sanctuary at all, and increasing levels of restricted access governed the courtyard, sanctum and inner sanctum.
The pillar of smoke rising to Heaven from the altar symbolized the intimate connection between Man and God, but the smoke itself was produced in the basest way, by burning slaughtered animals.
Priests were to wear gleaming white difficult-to-clean linen garments, symbolizing purity, but would soon be spattered in impossible-to-remove bloodstains shortly after they started their sacrificial work.
The Temple was a site of pilgrimage, where you would gather to see and be seen by God, but when you got there, the closest you could come was the front lawn.
Though the Temple is the site of worship for every Jew, nowhere are the status distinctions between Jews more pronounced. Priests, Levites, and Israelites played very different roles. Wealthy Jews brought different sacrifices than poor Jews. Judges and scholars played official roles. Though all belonged at the Temple site, none were created equal there.
The courtyard of the Temple housed the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of the Jewish people, which sat in between a bazaar and a slaughterhouse.
Although the greatest prohibition in Judaism is idolatry, sitting in the Holy of Holies, on top of the Ark of the Covenant that had held the Ten Commandments, was an idol! The center of all Jewish worship and intention was a statue of two cherubs facing one another.

The Temple’s lesson about unity one of the greatest lessons of Jewish wisdom. Unity is not about universal adherence to one idea or ideal. Judaism proposes that unity is about being able to hold many contradictory ideas in our minds at once, and to be able to express them in our lives. The point to aim at, the point where God’s presence could be said to rest, is between the two cherubs. The universe, and our relationship to God, is fundamentally complex. Life is not a morality play or kabuki theater, where obedience to the form defines right and wrong. But life is also not a solipsistic play, where our own egos and intellects determine morality for the entire universe.

To hold contradiction together requires diversity. One person, alone, cannot, contra Walt Whitman, contain all the multitudes. Judaism requires many sects, many tribes, many schools of Halacha, Hashkafah, and Haskalah. We’ve always had them, and together, as a milling and teeming mass of intellect, spirituality, zealotry, piety, and artistry we’ve expressed our love, awe, fear, passion and intimacy for our Father, Master, Teacher, King, and Beloved, the Breath of Life, the Universal, the Unmoved Mover, the Unknown and Unknowable, and all the other seventy names for God.

Last year, I talked about how the Satmar Rebbe blamed the Holocaust on Zionism, while the Zionists blamed the Holocaust on the Jew of Exile, who could not shake himself out of his existential misery, shake off the shackles of his religious tradition, stand up, declare himself a nation and not a faith, and redeem himself. Both are wrong, but both are right. The answer is not to unify around one pole or the other. Had all Jews abandoned Judaism to move to Palestine, we would have lost the very soul of Judaism in exchange for a piece of dirt and a UN membership. Had Jews not taken to the Zionist dream and built what was to be the State of Israel, the Holocaust might well have ended the Jewish project entirely. And they are not the only ones who are right and wrong. The Reform, who cast away law in favor of ethics, and the Orthodox, who cast away ethics in favor of law, and the Conservative, who cast away principles in favor of compromise, and secular who cast away history in favor of culture, and all the other sects, groups and denominations of Modern Judaism, they are all wrong, and all right, and all need to learn not just to tolerate, but to dignify the other as necessary, as valid, as honored.

Diversity ensures our survival. Without it, we have no mechanism for finding new ideas, for defining new ways to express our core values in a changing world, or for striving for our own improvement and drawing closer to our ideals and our vision of the Divine. Tisha B’av teaches us that baseless hatred is baseless not because there are no core issues at stake between groups, but because each group is striving for a common goal. Each group is working ‘lishma’ for a pure purpose, even as differences abound about how to pursue it or even what it is. Our challenge is to wrap our arms around all of this stiff-necked people with its squabbling and bickering, to love it, to nurture it, and to lead it it to achieve its promise as a light unto the world. So long as we have not achieved that, I’ll have reason to fast on Tisha B’av.

The Gap Between Hareidim and Modern Orthodox

July 24, 2009 at 8:40 am | In beliefs, ethics, halacha, israel, jewish denominations, orthodox | 3 Comments

In XGH’s most recent post, How to stop Chareidim breaking the law, the suggestion was to emphasize Kiddush Hashem/Chillul Hasehm (sanctification/desecration of God’s name, usually through public conduct) and its implications for practical conduct in the public square.

While I agree with the sentiment of the post, I think it misses a fundamental point.

There is a 3,000-year old debate in Judaism as to whether human initiative and human judgment is of value.

One position is that God has laid out for us the manner in which we should act, and that the human challenge is to submit to that, to yoke ourselves to that path, and to blind ourselves from anything that might lead us astray. This is the path adopted by Hareidim today.

The other position is that we have been granted a Divine gift of judgment and decision-making, and that we must use those faculties to choose a proper path through an ever-changing world. This is the Modern Orthodox (MO) position.

When the MO look at the Hareidi world, they level a critique based on observed facts. How can it be, they say, that you are following the Divine path, if your real-world outcomes are so poor? Your institutions are built on corruption and theft, your youth are delinquent, uneducated, and filthy, and your communities rally behind th emsot odious villains and act out violently as thier only means of expression. Surely this can’t be God’s will!

In turn, when Hareidim look at the MO, they don’t look so much on the facts on the ground as much as the influences. If you, the MO, want to believe your judgment is sanctified and in line with the Divine will, you must purify yourselves. If you were influenced only by Torah and expressed excellent character traits, perhaps we could believe in your judgment. But instead, your homes have televisions and internet showing obscene images and abhorrent culture. Your children grow up knowing more rock songs by heart than mishnayot, idolizing movie stars instead of Gedolim, and wasting their time on Harry Potter instead of Halacha.

I’m not sure how to bridge this gap, but I do know that the first step towards bridging it is understanding it. This is an ancient Machloket. It’s the same as the argument over whether the world was created in Tishrei or in Nisan. It’s the same as the argument over whether God performing miracles on your behalf is a good reflection on your or a bad reflection on you. It’s the same as the argument over whether we should start the Haggadah with the story of our slavery in Egypt or our idolatrous roots in Mesopotamia. And this isn’t something we’re going to easily resolve.

Conversions in Controversy: The Orthodox Patrilineal Descent

June 28, 2009 at 9:51 pm | In beliefs, dating and marriage, halacha, jewish denominations, orthodox | 6 Comments

By now you’ve all heard about Hareidi Rabbi Avraham Sherman, who heads Israel’s High Rabbinical court, and his ongoing retroactive nullifications of conversions to Judaism. This story has been building for some time, as the Hareidi establishment in Israel, which has long controlled the rabbinic arm of the government, has sought to monopolize power over the definition of who is a Jew.

There are excellent political and religious reasons for them to do so, of course. The question of who is a Jew defines who may claim the right to citizenship in Israel through the Law of Return, and with that citizenship, the basket of Aliyah benefits. From the Hareidi perspective, limiting aliyah only to Hareidi Jews, or at least Orthodox Jews, means that all the money flows to them, and that no money is spent on Russian immigrants, South American converts, or people converted by non-Orthodox clergy.

Many are rightfully tearing their hair out over the potential confusion that retroactive nullification of conversion creates. The Wolf, for example, wonders if uncertainty over conversions will lead to converts being unreliable for any kind of religious obligation, from testimony to minyan. He further speculates in a later post:

And how about things that have long-reaching consequences? What if you use a convert as a witness to your wedding? Or even worse, what if a convert serves on a bais din (or is a witness) to a divorce? Can you imagine the halachic nightmare that would result from a witness (or judge) on a divorce case (or multiple cases) being found to be not Jewish retroactively, throwing all those divorcees, their new spouses and children (and grandchildren) into some halachic purgatory from which they and their descendants may never escape? What about a convert who sits on a bais din for other conversions — you could have multiple “generations” of invalidated conversions, each wreaking havoc on countless individuals and society as a whole. And, don’t forget, this doesn’t go just for the convert, but for any descendant of a female convert as well!

I believe that this path leads to both a cleavage between Hareidi Judaism and the rest of us, but also to the complete abandonment of Judaism as a hereditary status. By performing these retroactive nullifications, Hareidi Judaism is casting into doubt conversions done by otherwise-respected institutions of MOdern Orthodoxy, like the RCA. As such, the RCA will eventually be forced to reject Hareidi hegemony over them, and will have to work against Hareidi authority over the Israeli Rabbinate. They already are in alliance with the Religious Zionists on this issue, but they will need to work with the Masroti movement and even the Reform movement to rewrite the rules. For all that, they may not even be successful.

What will be true is that between intermarriage, patrilineal descent, and Hareidi conversion nullification, the question of who is a Jew and who is not will have many answers and no clarity of any kind. For many, the only pragmatic way of dealing with this reality is to rely on people and their self-identifications. Sure, when it comes to weddings some people might ask for a bit more background on a person’s Jewish provenance, but for the gabbai at a shul, the question of Kohen, Levi, or Yisrael will remain the standard by which Judaism is defined in the day-to-day. Whether this is good for Judaism or not I don’t know, but it does represent another stage in our evolution away from a tribal religion and towards something much greater, but also more diffuse.

Looking for the Middle

June 28, 2009 at 10:37 am | In beliefs, jewish denominations, orthodox | 1 Comment

I recently saw a post from YD about the search for a middle path between Yeshivish Orthodoxy and Modern Orthodoxy. It was actually the second post in a series, and the first post goes into even greater depth about his feeling that YU is too far over to the right:

Which brings me to YU. I found there to be very little guidance from the Rebbeim in Yeshiva University. Many of them only come in for a few hours, just to give shiur, and leave. Very little is heard from the Rebbeim besides the Torah they teach [...] every once in a while there was a speech about a meaningful topic like dating or something, but this was never followed by a “meet with the rebbe and discuss your issues personally” session. In short, one could easily get the impression there that Talmud Torah is the only important value.

What’s funny about the whole thing is that YCT, which presents itself as left of YU, is seen as too far left. But in the left wing of the MO world, YCT is not left enough, particularly on gender issues. In the meantime, those same folks see Hadar, the right wing of the Conservative world, as too far left.

It appears to me that what we’re actually seeing across the denominations and beyond them, is a supreme dissatisfaction with the status quo. When the people of the United States elected Barack Obama, analysts explained that this was a a ‘change’ election. They were right, but they didn’t say enough. I believe we’re in a moment of tremendous change. I think that in the last few years we have seen the beginning of tremendous challenges to the status quo, and that we will continue to see challenge and change in more and more areas of of our lives.

Nearly all of our institutions are at all-time lows when it comes to approval ratings. This is true of political, religious, business, and even civic institutions. We appear to have reached a tipping point that is birthing new institutions and placing terrific pressure on our existing ones to reform. And at the heart of all this cry for change is a desire for greater openness and unity, a focus on pragmatism over ideology, and an unwillingness to fight the same fights over and over again.

These principles inform the broad river that is coursing through our institutions, and we don’t know how it will turn out. The entrenched forces seeking to maintain the status quo are powerful, well-organized, and willing to go far for their beliefs. We have already seen what this conflict looks like when that river threatens to overflow the levees. We’ve seen brutality and murder of peaceful protesters in Iran, we’ve seen violently rioting Hareidim clashing with police in Jerusalem, and we’ve seen the giants of the automotive industry totter and topple into a feeding frenzy of special interests. We don’t know yet how it’s all going to turn out, but make no mistake, change is coming, change is here, and we are responsibly, both individually and collectively to harness its force for the better by being more open to one another, more focused on what’s real, and less willing to be derailed by the issues that have divided us in the past.

Land, People, and God (pt 1)

June 8, 2009 at 9:57 am | In beliefs, culture, israel, jewish denominations, politics | Leave a Comment

What is Judaism It’s not a race, nor is it just a religion. Ethnicity doesn’t capture the religious elements, nor does nation. The Mordechai Kaplan idea that Judaism is a civilization is sufficiently expansive, but not really specific enough.

The best paradigm for defining Judaism to date is the three-pronged approach. Judaism is a civilization that expresses commitments to the land of Israel, the Jewish people and their culture, and the God of Israel as worshipped through Jewish religion.

Speaking broadly, we can say that throughout history, strong expression of any two of these three prongs has been sufficient to create a Jewish society. Expressing all three, however, requires an intetgrative vision that has proven elusive.

We can divide Judaism, with exceptions, into three time periods. Ancient Judaism, from the Exodus through the destruction of the Second Temple, can largely be seen as Judaism built on Land and God, but not on the people of Israel. The people lived in the Land of Israel and defined themselves around that reality. They also worshipped the Jewish God. What they lacked was a sense of cohesive identity. Tribal identities, local loyalties, and ethnic differences all stood in the way of a sense of united peoplehood.

Over many hundreds of years, Jewish identity emerged, but it took the volution of many new institutions and new ideas. The move from tribal judges to a monarchy, and from decentralized worship to Temple worship were important steps, but progress did not happen in a straight line. The split of the monarchy into Judah and Israel, the establishment of alternate sites of worship , and the evolution of separate holy texts rmained significant obstacles to unity.

The Babylonian exlie and the reforms of Ezra helped create a single sacred text and a shared sense of identity, but Jewish sectarianism of a non-tribal nature replaced the previous tribal splits. Hellenists, Essenes, Baithusians, Samaraitans, Sadduccess, Pharisees, and Christians were only some of the sects that divided Judaism and defeated any sense of common purpose or identity.

The destruction of the Second Temple and the seconf Exile posed an enormous challenge to Judaism, forcing it to reorganize. The Land of Israel was gone, and Judaism reformed around Nation and God. Over the next few hundred years, Judaism would shed most of its sects, divorce decisively from Christianity, abandon Jewish Europe and its Greek coonnections, and recenter itself around a new set of leaders whose authority flowed from their mastery of religious matters. The central institutions of synagogue and study hall brought regular religious practice into a communal space; so different from the Temple in Jerusalem. The cohesiveness of these new communities was such that the lack of a land or polity could be overcome through a strong sense of peoplehood.

This strong sense of peoplehood was reinforced throughout the Middle Ages by the outside. It was very difficult for a Jew to be anything other than a Jew. Full conversion to Christianity was possible, but it carried with it the cost of leaving your entire old life behind. Similarly, there was little social or economic mobility for most of the period.

The Enlightenment changed all that. Among its revolutionary ideas was the notion of history as a tale of human progress. Economic and social mobility, along with a borad redefinition of human rights and a rejection of class and caste systems, birthed the possibility of a person selecting an idenitity rather than being born into one. Religious ideas like predestination were rejected, religious institutions were subject to withering attacks, and the concept of national identity was forwarded to replace religion as a means of uniting people and creating common cause.

Zionism was born in this era. It represents a Judaism of People and Land, wiith no God. The Zionist concept was the Jews were a people like any other, and needed to redeem themselves, retake their land, and live their national destiny on the soil of their ancestors. Religious opposition to Zionism as a forbidden hastening of the Messianic era was deemed archaic – an expression of a Jew so imprinted by the ghetto that he no longer wanted to be free.

Conceptually, Zionism was very attractive,and following the Holocaust, it was seen as proven correct and desparately necessary. So long as the Jewish people felt an existential crisis, Zionism represented an ideology of survival that encompassed and sheltered all that was destroyed in Europe, from the cosmopolitan Jewery of Berlin to the Jews of the shtetls.

Each of the above representations of Judaism is missing something, and is therefor uniquely vulnerable. Thought the State of Israel has been through trying times, by 1973 it was clear that Israel did not face an existential threat to its existence from its Arab neighbors, and its nuclear deterrent capabilities drew the period of widescale, open conflict in Israel to a close.

With survival no longer the only issue, but with Israelis continuing to pay a high cost to live in Israel, it was inevitable that the question would arise – why? Why live in Israel? America had a thriving, secure, robust Diaspora community. Life was easy, there was no army service, or violent neighbors, or random acts of terror. Zionism had not really considered any ongoing role of Diaspora Jewish communities, even as it depended on their ongoing financial and political support. Suddenly though, many young Israelis began to abandon the Zionist dream in favor of personal salvation from the burdens of being an Israeli, and of living in Israel. Theodore Herzl said ‘Im Tirtzu, Ein zo Agadah’ – if you will it/desire it, it is not a dream. Modern Israeli graffiti today attributes a different statement to Herzl – ‘Lo Rotztim? Lo Tazrich!’ – You don’t want it? Fine, we don’t need to have it.’

Some might say that this view is short-sighted, and that the American Jewish experience is unique in history, or unlikely to last. One day, America will become hostile to Jews, and Israel will be needed as a refuge. While this analysis may prove true, its power as an ideology is waning. Israel cannot just be a place to run to, not for those who live there and often feel they’d raather run somewhere else, or those who live elsewhere and will not excuse Israel’s conduct in exchange for a promise of haven that they will likely never need.

And that leaves us where we are today. We need a new vision for Judaism, that can integrate, to some extent, our land, our people and our faith. It must give purpose to our presence in Israel as well as in the Diaspora. It must cast a broad net over all of us, a Sukkah under which we can all shelter, that gives us a sense of commonality and peoplehood. And it must mediate our varied relationships to God and faith. We can’t pick two out of three – we have to integrate all three.

In the next post, I’ll look at the rise of denominationalism as a response to Enlightenment, and the ways in which denominations responded to the Zionist rejection of God by attempting to articulate Godly philosophies of Zionism.

Election Without Direction

February 10, 2009 at 1:23 pm | In beliefs, israel, politics | Leave a Comment

Today is Election Day in Israel, though it’s hard to tell if you’re not actually in Israel. Haaretz, the Israeli daily, even published a story about how foreign journalists are having a tough time selling their stories to their hometown papers.

My theory is that it’s because the elections in Israel are about nothing at all. Israeli society has reached a consensus that there is simply no partner for peace among the Palestinians. Fatah may be willing, but they aer unable to make peace, while Hamas is able, but unwilling. This critical issue that resists characterization as either foreign or domestic policy has collapsed the political space that normally divides right from left in Israel. Instead, we have three centrist parties that have run listless, issueless, and rudderless campaigns. All of these parties are out of ideas, and one of them will find themselves governing without any leadership or goal.

Perhaps now is the time to offer a different idea, and a new coalition for advancing it. Many have previously observed that the project we call Israel is comprised of three pillars: a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a state situated on the ancient Biblical land of Israel. So far, nobody has managed to do better than to encompass two of these three pillars at a time.

Right now, for example, we have a Jewish state, whose fundamental character is enshrined, most powerfully, in the Law of Return, that guarantees citizenship to any Jew. We also have a state that wields authority over nearly all of the Biblical land of Israel. What we do not have is a democratic state. Over one third of the people governed by Israel do not have full civil rights, to say nothing of rights of citizenship or even a path to normalization.

The alternative vision is to have a Jewish state and a democratic state, but to release the third pillar by ceding the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians – a two-state solution. While many Israelis are prepared to cede the land in exchange for peace and security, few Israelis believe that giving up the land to the current crop of Palestinian leaders will in fact lead to peace and security. There is also opposition to ceding land under any circumstances not only from Religious Zionists, but also, perhaps surprisingly, from many Russian immigrants.

But what if we chose to give up on that other pillar, the one that guarantees a Jewish state? What might that look like? I think we’d be talking about the bi-national state, or one-state solution.

The one-state solution is not new, but it has a troubled history for supporters of Israel. It has primarily been forwarded by the most vituperative and hateful voices in the far-left, anti-Zionist community. Most recently, the ‘reformed’ Muammar Qaddafi wrote about “Isratine” in the New York Times. But let’s pull away for a moment from the dubious provenance of the idea, and examine it on its merits.

Critics of the one-state solution see it as a ruse – a demographic act of terrorism against the Jewish state. The argument, as forwarded by Alan Dershowitz and others, is that as soon as the Palestinians represent an electoral majority, they will vote to replace the binational state with an Islamic state.

Personally, I find the argument ludicrous and unrealistic. The key assumptions that the argument rests upon are that all Palestinians will vote as a bloc, that they all want to be governed by Islamic law, and that no counterbalance can exist to prevent this kind of parliamentary coup de etat.

None of these assumptions stand up to scrutiny. Palestinians today are already divided between Hamas and Fatah, and would likely be further divided if other options existed. Arabs as an ethnicity are as internally divided as Jews as an ethnicity – the joke that where there are two Jews there are three opinions can be said about Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular with nothing lost in translation.

There’s also no indication that Palestinians desire a religious government. Hamas today stands for Islamic rule, but it used to receive its support from Saddam Hussein, rather than from Syria and Iran, and was a largely secular movement. The shift towards Islam has to do with the will of its Iranian backers, not the will of the people. Fatah, the other elected representative of the Palestinian people, is a secular movement. Why would the opportunity to participate as equal citizens in a binational state suddenly turn the Palestinians into Islamic fundamentalists?

Finally, there’s no reason to believe that Palestinians could vote in a brand new government on the basis of an electoral majority. The barriers to such a path are constitutional institutional, and military.

A binational state would need a constitution that protects human, civil, political, and religious rights for all citizens. Such a constitution would also have to enshrine a power-sharing agreement that would allow all the sectors of Israeli society to have their voices heard.

Whatever institutions are crafted by the new state, there can be no doubt that Jews would still wield tremendous power, that would certainly be sufficient to counterbalance the demographic attack strategy feared by some. Jews will still control most of the wealth of the country at the outset, most of its trade and political connections, and will still make up most of its civil servants. That kind of institutional power is difficult to overthrow simply by winning an election.

Should the worst come to pass, however, and we’ve badly misjudged the intention of the Palestinians, their remains an enormous barrier to their success in converting Israel into a Muslim state. That barrier is the IDF. The Jewish population of Israel is and will still be in control of the jet planes, the tanks, the armaments, and of course the nuclear weapons. Whatever changeover we envision, the reins of military power would be transferred very slowly and very carefully.

I think we can also fairly question the demographic threat to the binational state. Right now, Israelis emigrate at a high rate, while Palestinians have nowhere to go and nothing to do but have children. In a binational state we could reasonably expect a few changes to these demographic trends. First, some Palestinians would seek to reunite with their families in other countries. Second, a new national identity and mission could well cut into Israeli emigration. Third, Jews in the Diaspora will flock once more to Israel. Some will come specifically because they want to counter the demographic threat. Others will be attracted to the chance to settle in Biblical Israel, and others will want to return home to be part of the new chapter of national life.

The real issue is what is the Jewish character of the state of Israel? Right now, that character is expressed through the Law of Return, but also through government policies that explicitly favor the rights of Jews, even at the expense of citizen Israeli-Arabs, to say nothing of non-citizen Palestinians.

The religious character of the state is a source of intense dissatisfaction on all side. The secular Jews feel coerced by the religious in every facet of their lives, from how and whom they wed to the availability of public transportation on Saturday. Religious Jews separate themselves more and more from the life of the state by living in their own enclaves and ghettos, stoning outsiders who violate their norms, and refusing to serve in the IDF or other national service, even as their communities rely on government handouts to survive.

The true character of a nation should be expressed by its people. Zionism is a floundering ideology. In the absence of a galvanizing external threat, it loses all shape, direction, and definition. Why must Jews be in their own land and have their own state? The need for refuge is one important reason, but for Jews, perhaps short-sighted Jews, who live in Israel, it is not enough. When Miss Israel said that she’d rather live in New York than put up with all the problems and issues of living in Israel, she was excoriated. But she and her generation are voting with their feet. They don’t see a cause in Israel, they just see heartache and heartbreak.

But there is a reason for Jews to live in the State of Israel, in the land of Israel. It’s the same reason that Jews have always had. It’s to unite opposing ideologies – to go through the process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in the world spotlight.

It was Jews who fused the diversity of peoples and faiths born in Mesopotamia with the monistic structure of Egyptian society and religion and emerged with a pluralistic, multi-ethnic monotheism. It was Jews who connected story-telling, law, and writing to produce a document that is the underpinning of Islam and Christianity. It was Jews who harnessed the power of dialectic reasoning that emerged from Greece and created a rationalist religious structure that we know as Talmud and Halacha. And it was Jews who took the parochial teachings of one faith and extended its principles of monotheism, Sabbath, and redemption throughout the world.

The mission that falls to Jews today is to bridge between East and West, and to prove that the Western ideals of democracy can be alloyed with the Eastern ideals of faith and tribe. And the best place to do that is in the land of Israel, with all of its mixed population, holy sites, and ancient stories. That mission will define the character of the land, not its demography.

New York Times Gets Religion

January 1, 2009 at 9:59 pm | In beliefs, culture | 1 Comment

Every single person should read, study, meditate and focus on this quote from Dr. Michael McCullough, a psychologist from the University of Miami. The quote was delivered in the context of an interview for a New York Times article (interesting throughout) about the role of religion in influencing self-discipline and self-control.

Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness.

The aura of sacredness; the ability to be mavdil ben kodesh l’chol, to distinguish between the sacred and the mundane is the base mission of humanity, and in fact, God’s first act of creation that was not ex nihilo. In other words, God’s first act that is imitable by mankind is separating the sacred from the mundane, and the proven method by which we humans come to acquire that ability is through religious practice and worship. Good stuff.

Homogeneous Orthodox

October 27, 2008 at 12:30 pm | In beliefs, halacha, jewish denominations, orthodox | 6 Comments

A friend of mine recently challenged me to name my biggest problem with the Orthodox community. I told him he had two choices: he could take me out to the bar and pay for my drinks while I ranted and raved, or he could give me a few days to think about it and then check my blog. In a display of fiscal discipline that I both envy and regret, he chose the latter option.

While I’ve spent lots of time on this blog and many others debating Jewish philosophy, the problem of evil, challenges to Divine authorship of the Torah and the historicity of the Tanach, these pale in comparison to another issue. My biggest problem with Orthodoxy is the requirement that everyone be the same, have the same relationships to one another, to their community, and to God.

The central assumption that Orthodoxy rests upon is that there’s really only one way to be Jewish, and that’s by following Halacha – or rather, by following a system of rules that is based in halachic thinking, but which has clearly evolved beyond it to encompass many extra-halachic rules and requirement. Put another way, it is the equation of Orthodox culture with Jewish validity.

One of the best features of Jewish learning is that it is so personal. Attributing what we’ve learned to the person who taught it to us is redemptive in our tradition. It turns our attention not only to the words themselves, but to the men behind them, and when we look at these men we discover a tremendous diversity in their religious expressions.

Even as they reveal this diversity, the Midrash and Talmud also try to paper it over. In many passages they struggle with Biblical figures violating contemporary halachic norms, and they introduce novel, apologetic interpretations that recast the characters, most frequently, as ingenious halachic acrobats. Mordechai, for example, is questioned over why he refused to bow to Haman, which would have been halachically permissible. The Midrash posits that Haman wore an idol, thus putting Mordechai in a predicament. An interesting idea, but it suggests that Mordechai’s only appropriate lens for choosing his actions is the halacha.

My sense is that the Midrash and Talmud were not engaging in revisionist history and asserting that halacha was indeed the driving force in th thought process of Mordechai or any other Biblical character. I think they were engaging in an imaginative exercise to bring these long-dead figures into focus. The question is whether the the lens they used was the only correct one, or whether it was the right one for their situation. I woudl go further and say that Midrash and Talmud were ‘inside baseball’, not intended for mass consumption. The modern-day Orthodox conception of halacha as the sole arbiter of values was not even shared by the master halachicists themselves, and movement from Mussar to Kabbala to Hassidut explored other soruces of value and other normative traditions that do not emerge from the Talmud or the Shulchan Aruch.

I’m probably going to be posting more critical thoughts on Orthodoxy, but I think that they all stem from this point. Orthodox Judaism today equates normative value with halacha, and halacha with Orthodox culture. Both of these connections are suspect, and they leave me yearning for something real, something true, something that gives religious significance to my own sense of right and wrong, to my own sense of sacred and profane, to the soul within me that finds no nourishment in the Orthodoxy around me.