Day 4: Is Jewish Renewal the Next Step in Spirituality, or Boomer Narcissism?

From: Arthur Waskow To: Daniel Bronstein Subject: We must learn to live with power

Daniel,

If I repeat myself, it’s because I feel unheard and caricatured.

A new Judaic paradigm will not require us to abandon all elements of the older paradigms. Of course “Love your neighbor” from Torah (that’s Biblical Judaism) and Hillel’s interpretation of it (Rabbinic Judaism) remain valuable. Just as Hillel used what came from a previous paradigm, so can we. And we do.

But crucial elements of an old paradigm can become rigid and deadly. A major example: sacrificial offerings at the Temple. Maimonides taught that we dropped the sacrifices because we grew more mature and didn’t need them. They were regressive, childish. We needed a new paradigm.

I am surprised that you seem unsure whether Rabbinic Judaism was a new paradigm, a form of Judaism quite different from Biblical Judaism.

I am especially surprised that you scoff at the idea that Rabbinic Judaism presupposes that the Jewish people do not have and cannot exercise political power.

With the Bar Kokhba rebellion, Rabbi Akiba made an attempt to acquire politico-military power and independence for the Jewish people. Even though the rabbis thought that Akiba was an amazing teacher, they wrote Bar Kokhba out of the sacred history and downplayed the Maccabees precisely to prevent bids for political power, which had proved so disastrous.

Two millennia later, the Jews now have power. And because the rabbis had so little experience in exercising it, Rabbinic Judaism cannot guide us in how an Israeli Army or an AIPAC should behave. We must draw from Torah to create a kind of Judaism appropriate to our new reality—just as the rabbis once drew on a few lines of Hosea and Isaiah and Hannah in order to change Judaism’s focus from animal sacrifice to prayer.

Another example: the rabbis explicitly gave up on the Jubilee Year practice of redistributing land and letting it rest, saying this applied only in the Land of Israel, and only when the majority of the Jewish people lived there. As a result, the only “environmental” concept in Rabbinic Judaism is Bal Tashchit, a very weak way of protecting the earth.

This made sense for an era when the Jewish people had no way of making “land policy” or what we now call “environmental policy,” because they had no political power in the Land of Israel or any other land. But now we have both the need and the power to work with other communities toward healing the Earth. There are hints of what to do in some aspects of Biblical Judaism, but almost none in Rabbinic teaching. We need a new paradigm.

I do, however, want to celebrate one of your comments:

“In fact, given the horrendous job humans are doing these days in managing the world, I would welcome being bossed around by God, especially since we are ‘scorching’ the world.”

That’s precisely my point. You would welcome being bossed around by God, but it ain’t happening. Why keep addressing the God you know ain’t there, when you could be addressing the God who is—the mysterious but palpable YHWH, Breath of Life, joyful Breeze, shattering Hurricane, in-breath and out-breath. That metaphor for God might help you to not burn up the world, because you will feel its interwovenness with you. In contrast, God-as-King makes many Jews feel resentful, rebellious, as if they hold no stake in the world He owns.

As for the Orthodox community, I am not in the least surprised by their resurgence. They are reacting
against modernity by going back before it. Put women back in the bottle, other religions back in the bottle, the Earth back in the bottle. To do this, they need a lot more coercive power than their zeydes did. One hundred years ago, nobody had to beat up women to keep them from davening at the Western Wall. Now the genie is out of the bottle. It takes violence to put it back in.

So I see the extreme Orthodox as “Jewish restoration,” not continuity. This is very different from traditional Judaism.

Meanwhile, Renewal and Reconstructionism have pioneered the full involvement of gay and lesbian Jews. Conservative Judaism, long rigidly resistant, is following that path. Even Orthodoxy has its Trembling Before G-d, the film about gay Orthodox Jews that shook many people and opened many windows.

That is the rumbling sound of Rabbinic Judaism falling apart, a dozen bricks at a time rather than all at once. And it is the sound of a new home being built from many (not all) of the old bricks, along with some new hyper-insulated energy-conserving materials; and we are rearranging these raw materials into very new kinds of architecture.

Sh’ma!! To that sound, and to the breathing of the One! No branch of Judaism needs to vanish for the renewal of Torah and of the Jewish people, nor for a new paradigm to come into being.

Shalom,

Arthur

To: Arthur Waskow From: Daniel Bronstein Subject: Grass will Grow in Our Cheeks

Dear Arthur,

Sh’ma: I have heard you, and I have listened to you. As for caricature, I think you have been doing quite a bit of that in the ways you discuss “Rabbinic Judaism” and traditional conceptions of God.

A former icon of the boomer generation, Timothy Leary, spoke of “old” knowledge as “canned, static,” and “dead,” and of everyone becoming “his own Buddha.” I don’t want to caricature you, but Leary’s ghost echoes in some of your words.

Even so, your last letter is far more nuanced: It is heartening to see that you have shifted from the
metaphor of “dead idols” to that of “old bricks.” That’s progress.

I am also heartened that you wrote that no “present branch of Judaism needs to vanish for the renewal of Torah and of the Jewish people.” I am not Orthodox and often dissent from its ideology and practice. At the same time, we should acknowledge that Jewish “Orthodoxy” is far from monolithic and is in fact probably the most diverse “stream” of Judaism. I have been enriched by many aspects of Orthodoxy and have learned from many Orthodox teachers.

I understand that the Judaism of the Tanach differs from the Judaism of the Mishnah or Talmud. Yes, animal sacrifice is radically different from prayer. However, I object to your broad pronouncements about ancient and “Rabbinic” Judaism; we really don’t know a whole lot about how it “really was.”

I understand “power” differently from you. I don’t believe it stems only from politics, and I believe that the rabbis often empowered Jews by helping them maintain their humanity and their sense of history.

I believe in a God who is “there” and who is “here.” And while I regret human failings as well as God’s seeming absence, I am unwilling to relocate God to the self, which really returns us to the original discussion about narcissism.

We disagree about whether the Torah and Jewish people need to be “renewed.” I’m still old-fashioned enough to want to affirm what some rabbis taught so many centuries ago: the learning of Torah is equal to all other mitzvot because it leads to all other mitzvot (Talmud Torah k’Neged Kulam; it still resonates far better in the original Hebrew).

The need for renewal suggests decrepitude, and while certain forms of Judaism and perhaps even segments of the Jewish people have become decrepit, Jews and Judaism have been in an ongoing state of renewal for many centuries. I don’t think that we are anywhere close to knowing all the answers, or even whether we have been asking the right questions.

You mention Rabbi Akiba. He was illiterate for most of his life until he humbled himself, attending school with children, ultimately becoming one of our greatest teachers. Even so, he placed his faith in a soldier, Bar Kokhba, proclaiming the latter as the Messiah who had arrived, in the midst of war and profound suffering, to redeem Israel. Even our greatest teachers can be wrong. As one of Akiba’s rabbinical colleagues explained “Akiba, grass will grow out of your cheeks and David’s son the Messiah will still not have come.”

Arthur, the grass will grow out of our cheeks before the arrival of the messianic age. It will take all of us, collectively as well as individually, in a partnership with God, whose spark resides within us but still transcends us, to bring about the world we yearn for.

Shalom,

Dan