The Technology of Judaism
Jay Michaelson has a piece up at the Forward about what spirituality is supposed to do and how Jewish practice works, about the need to move from “myth to function” .
…it doesn’t matter whether God is a benevolent father looking down on us all, or a delusion of the mind. It doesn’t matter whether the Exodus happened or not. What matters is that we possess technology that can transform the self, open the mind, unite a community, motivate ethical action and bring forth tears when your heart is broken. Before you light candles, you’re thinking of your mortgage; afterward, you’re thinking of your kids, or the meaning of life, or something else that actually matters. That’s what counts. Of course, if the Passover story, or the Yom Kippur myth, helps you do those things, great. If not, drop them. It’s the transformation, not the myth, that matters.
I am drawn to this idea that Jewish ritual provides a set of tools for transformation, a time-tested set of tools that has built a civilization in which are contained countless ideas and worldviews, and which has seen the rise and fall of many different creeds and many more nations. The reason generation after generation has carried on Judaism and constantly sought its renewal–from the Hasidim to the Reconstructionists–is that this set of practices might just work.
One can find spiritual power in a sunset, one can build a community around The Jonas Brothers, one can base an ethical world view off the collected works of John Steinbeck, but for durable tools to do any or all of these things, Jewish practice (however you build it) has proven quite effective at doing all of these things for quite a long time under a lot of different conditions. The Orthodox believe Torah and Jewish ritual have value because they are the word of God. That works for them. I believe it has value because it works for the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox alike. It provides a set of principles and practices that reflect the best of humanity and certainly inspired other great religious traditions. It does not lay sole claim to the truth, and is not the only path to “the good life.” But it is a good path to the good life.
Rooting Jewishness in a living Torah–a living, evolving, and useful spiritual practice–not only ensures the continued survival of Judaism, but uproots it from the troublesome ethnic chauvinism that cuts African and African-American Jews out of the picture, that devalues Sephardic traditions, and it cuts through the nationalist politics of Zionism that too often value F-18s over ethics. The ritual are a set of tools, a spiritual technology that, when applied, serves a variety of functions, both social and personal. It is adaptable, upgradable, expandable, and people are always tinkering with it, finding new and unexpected uses. Even better, it’s Open Source. Anyone can study it and engage with it. In fact, that’s a requirement. In that way it’s more like Linux that Mac OS X.
This isn’t all New-Agey nonsense. Look to the year 622 BCE, when Josiah declared the discovery of the Law Moses had recieved, the Book of Deuteronomy. It was then that Judaism went from an oral tradition to one of written laws. Many at the time feared that codifying the relgion into the written word would destroy it, would turn the text into an idol, that the scribes would inevitably corrupt the word of God or that the dynamism of the Israelite religion would be lost. Writing the Torah was a revolutionary act, just as, a century later, Ezra the scribe would revolutionize Judaism again by making the Torah the center of the religion, rather than the Temple, and just as assimilated German Jews and scholarly Polish Jews would revolutionize it again in the Mid-18th century in their own ways. Each of these acts was transformative, revolutionary, and hotly contested. Judaism has never been only one thing, and has constantly sought to reinvent itself for the times. Seeking out the why behind the ritual is part of Jewish tradition since the beginning, and this sort of questioning makes the religion live. If American Jews can be exposed to the phenomenal utility of Jewish ritual, perhaps even the most secular, assimilated among us can find their place in the continuum of Jewish life.
