With all this talk about non-dual Judaism, whether or not Orthodoxy is the "true" Judaism that Progressive Jews are just too damn lazy or stupid to accept, or whether G-d even exists, I like to propose an idea. That G-d can be explained with a simple, straight line.

Take a look at this image and ask yourself, "what is this?" It could be a letter: a lowercase "l" or an uppercase "I." It could be the number "1" or part of "11."

Imagine this image, from the perspective of a person walking through the woods. If you saw this image, say stapled to a tree, what would it be? Perhaps a sign pointing you in the right direction toward a walking path? Maybe it's a walking stick? Maybe it's some kind of warning or a piece of graffiti left behind?

Flip the image horizontally. What do we have? a picture of the horizon, a "negative" sign or a dash mark.

Now, let's take this line, and put it into a new context:

G - D

This single, straight line is now a part of something that philosophers, scholars, rabbis, priests and every day people have struggled with for thousands of years. It is everything for some, and nothing for others. It's the being so close that you can touch it, or something so remote that you can never truly know it.

With one straight line, we can find a million different perspectives. So what makes any of us vain enough to believe that something as huge as G-d can ever be agreed upon or argued in any way that isn't mental masturbation?

What is? G-d is! G-d is, is! And if for you, G-d is nothing, then G-d is still something. Thank G-d for that! 

The only reason I have ever witnessed Orthodox Jews drink Manischewitz is because my yeshiva was located 60 miles from their winery and would get free wine in return for the slave labor offered them in the form of rabbinical students. I would watch as Manischewitz blackberry wine was poured out like molasses into the Kiddush cup and a few brave souls would try this strange concoction and make faces that told me that it was better suited as an ice cream topper than as Kiddush wine.

Fast forward 10 years and I am stuck with this feeling of disgust every time that I witness a Jewish video on YouTube with someone trying to make fun of the Orthodox by drinking Manischewitz. Whether it was the infamous Jewish Lazy Sunday remake or the banned Miriam and Shoshana "Yeshiva Girls Gone Wild" video, there seems to be this reccurring theme of drunken Jews pounding Manischewitz and I'm sick of it.

It would be one thing if it were a bunch of secular Jews with wearing those free plastic white yarmulkes and having a Maxwell House-inspired Pesach seder, but it's not. In fact, if you were to get your entire Jewish education from YouTube you would probably think that all Jews ever drank was Manischewitz wine - and, on occasion - borscht. In fact a friend of mine who sometimes works as a wine connoisseur at Jewish food events in his area, has a hard time convincing secular Jews that they are allowed to use wine other than Manischewitz.

Besides for my yeshiva days in Rochester, New York - I have never once seen an Orthodox person drink or buy Manischewitz wine. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find it in a kosher wine store or wine store in a Jewish neighborhood. I just wish these Jewish videos would try and figure out Orthodox culture and realize that we have our own shitty wines, like Baron Herzog white zinfandel or Bartenura's Moscato Diasti, which many unemployed sheitel machers from the shtetls or Boro Park and Monsey prefer.  

The only Manischewitz product that Orthodox Jews eat en masse is Tam Tams (specifically to scoop up herring sans utensils at kiddush across the globe). Even the matzoh they make is mostly "not for passover use" (which I wil rant about some other time).  

Zeek's Editor-in-chief, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, talks with Rabbi Rebecca Alpert about social justice, feminism and her book, Whose Torah?

Zeek: When people hear your name, Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, they tend to think, "Jewish feminist lesbian." Has that label been useful or helpful for you?

 

Rabbi Rebecca Alpert: All labels are problematic, but I don't mind taking on this label, and people do think of me that way - though they are often shocked that my current work is on Jews and baseball, or that my earlier work was on Reform rabbis developing an understanding of healing in the early part of the twentieth century. The label, though, was helpful back in the 1970s and 1980s when the idea of a lesbian rabbi was shocking. I was perfectly happy to stand up and confuse people.

 

Zeek: I was impressed to learn in your new book,Whose Torah, that you have deep experience in peace and poverty work.

 

RA: I do see feminism and gay rights work as part of a larger progressive agenda, both within the Jewish community and in the world at large. I have always understood feminism as being about more than just equal rights for women. Feminism opened my eyes so I realized that if you make life better for women, you make life better for everybody. Social justice is the grounding for the movement. Coming out of Reform Judaism, I believed social justice was the main way we Jews could make a contribution.

 

Zeek: How do you see social justice and spirituality connected within Judaism?

 

RA: I am very moved by Arthur Waskow's vision linking social justice to spirituality. That connection has not been the main impetus for me. The older I've gotten the more secular I've become, but I really see the importance of people seeing that there is a religious vision for social justice. There are so many people in the Jewish world today for whom spirituality is the center of their Jewishness: it's great when they make that connection to social justice.

 

Zeek: In your book, you frame Judaism as a kinship network as well as a spiritual source of faith. One element we lack in contemporary America is strong community, and you need strong community for justice work.

 

RA: I'm with you 100%. We see ourselves as Jews, fundamentally, as both a cultural network and a religious community. They are intertwined. That understanding that Jewishness is not only about spirituality throws people sometimes. People are surprised that religious people don't think you are any less a Jew because you are not spiritual. I am a post-Zionist, but I am always deeply moved by the Israeli world, the way they need to deal with the secular-religious connection. For instance being gay in secular Israel - as long as you are not in the chareidi camp - people say 'they are our brothers because they are Jews, they deserve rights.' Of course, it's a problem if our community is limited only to Jews.

 

Zeek: If the social justice impetus comes from Judaism as an ethnic tradition, why not just do social justice work from a purely secular position, or from another community that one is part of-for example, you talk about African-American Jews, Arab Jews. If you are a Jew with that kind of dual community, why not do social justice from an African-American position as opposed to a Jewish one?

 

RA: I guess it's the "as opposed to" that I don't agree with. People find a place from which they do their work. I don't think one place is better than another. I am a Reconstructionist Jew, which means I don't believe Jews are the chosen people. Every group has something to contribute. If doing the work from the Jewish perspective is meaningful, then great. If doing it from a different perspective is meaningful, then great. The connections are more important to me than the divisions.

 

Zeek: I can hear people saying, "Oy vey! This rabbi is saying we don't have to believe in God and we don't have to be Jewish just because Judaism is better, so why bother? Why bother learning Torah? It's too difficult! Why would anyone be Jewish! This will kill Judaism!" You must get this sometimes.

 

RA: I wish I was so powerful, that I singlehandedly could kill Judaism. I would have to be a bit careful about what I ever said to anybody.

 

Zeek: (laughs)

 

RA: Seriously, I don't do this because I believe in God or because it's the best way, but because it's my way. I see great wisdom and beauty and truth in Judaism. If I didn't find Judaism a tremendous source of wonderful ideas I wouldn't be a rabbi. I think Judaism holds up to rational scrutiny. It holds up to my questions. I feel I am in the tradition of Abraham arguing with God. You know, God in the Bible does not get along so well with the Jewish people, and the Jews didn't get along so well with God. There is always an argument, always questioning. That is the most wonderful part of the Judaism I grew up with.

Religion in Israel: Too black and white?It may only take an hour to get from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv (provided your bus doesn’t break down), but the two often feel more like different planets than neighboring cities. In Israel, the animosity between secular and Orthodox is palpable and growing, but according to an article in yesterday’s J-Post, the emerging Jewish Renewal movement is targeting even the most “hard-core” secularists, and attempting to bring Jewish traditions back into modern Israeli life by finding the gray areas within religion.

The ambivalence about Judaism in Israel became clear to me one night as I sat drinking in an alleyway bar in Tel Aviv with my Israeli friend Omer. Omer has been studying abroad in Germany for the past few years, and admitted that he felt disconnected there, and had started attending a Friday night dinner with other Jewish students. “My father would disown me if he knew I was lighting Shabbat candles,” said Omer guiltily. “We come from a long line of staunch Tel Aviv atheists.”

In order to counteract this deep rooted aversion to religion, the Jewish Renewal movement (different from the 1960s American movement of the same name) takes a more flexible approach, focusing on ritual, tradition and spirituality rather than outright faith. While the term “secular synagogue” may seem like an oxymoron,to proponents of Jewish Renewal, it’s the basis of their ideology.

Dr. Asher Cohen, a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan's Political Science Department who recently wrote a paper on the failure of the Reform Movement to muster a significant following in Israel, said the movement lacked many of the drawbacks of Reform Judaism.

"First of all, there is no God," said Cohen. "Jewish Renewal is not a religion. So it does not turn off adamantly secular people."

Though the Jewish Renewal leaders identify their movement as distinctly Israeli, it’s hard not to sense that the trend mirrors the ever evolving definition of American Jewish identity. The search for cultural connections has taken many Americans beyond their local congregation or JCC. It is the reason why Jewcy exists, why small alternative congregations like Romemu are springing up across the country, and why birthright is quickly becoming the new bar mitzvah. For many, the search for meaning no longer revolves around the existence of God; it's about the need to find a comfortable, inclusive community.

 

I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t groan and shift in my chair when I read the following first line from a transcript of a Chicago television news show broadcast yesterday: “A southwest suburban school district has taken action, responding to the concerns of a Muslim parent.”

I envisioned a schoolhouse renovation involving footbath facilities or a plan to excise the Holocaust from social studies class. The first of which is occurring on the university level in this country, and the second of which has occurred in England.

However, then came the next line: “But now, as CBS 2's Suzanne Le Mignot reports, other parents are angry that traditional school holidays will be renamed or even eliminated.”

Apparently the school district is 30 percent Arab American and things got confusing when a student wanted the school to put up Ramadan decorations. The superintendent decided to strike the set, as it were, and go with no religion in the school. Period.

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There’s a popular article in today’s London Times called How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam by Phyllis Chesler, weirdly subtitled ‘Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?’
Phyllis Chesler: Is Angry
The jist of the article is that Islam itself is racist, and sexist, and if Sharia law isn’t taken on directly and altered to fit modern norms then fanatical Islam is going to take over the world. At the end of the article secularism is proscribed as the only safe and acceptable future for Islam. Chesler writes, “Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.” (Emphasis mine).

I have to say, this makes me really uncomfortable. I agree that sexism, racism, and hatred are bad no matter what context they’re in, but I don’t think waging a “secular war” against Islam is realistic or a good plan. Why? Because when you bring the word secular to the table, what most religious people hear is “heathen.”

My Jewish education was filled with pejorative comments about the secular world, and secular Jews. This was obviously a bad strategy, but I think it’s important to recognize that if you come to a religious leader or a member of a religious community and say, “We think it’s safer, better, wiser and truer to the word of God to live by this secular lifestyle,” you’re not going to convince anyone to join your team. Those communities define themselves by NOT being secular. If you use text study, legal analysis, and serious debate you might get somewhere because to religious people these things matter. But secularism? It’s everything they hate and are afraid of.

This is relevant in the Jewish community as much as it is in the Muslim community. While there are, of course, sects and communities that are completely unwilling to change their stances on any issue, most community leaders want to be able to champion a revolutionary new cause. It makes them look good and important, and it guarantees that they go down in history books. And even the most dogmatic communities tend to go along with what their fearless leader proscribes. Consider the Chafetz Chaim, a prominent rabbi who died only 73 years ago, and who went squarely against a Talmudic statement in Sotah 20b R. Eliezer says: Whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her obscenity. The Chafetz Chaim explained “Nowadays, in our iniquity, as parental tradition has been seriously weakened and women, moreover, regularly study secular subjects, it is certainly a great mitzvah to teach them Chumash, Prophets and Writings, and rabbinic ethics, such as Pirkei Avot, Menorat Hamaor, and the like, so as to validate our sacred belief; otherwise they may stray totally from G-d's path and transgress the basic tenets of religion, G-d forbid." (I got this translation from a Chabad source, but I think it’s pretty good.)

See, right there the word secular is used AS A BAD THING, even though what’s being promoted is a secular (and good) idea.

If we come charging at the Muslim world saying that they’ve been doing it wrong and the secular lifestyle is the way to go, we’re not going to convince anyone, and we’re going to make people defensive. But if we remind fundamentalists everywhere that the world’s three major religions were based on people coming onto the scene and implementing reforms, and then we find places in their texts and legal documents that can support our humanist claims…then we can get somewhere. Or at least I hope we can.

Like many of my religious friends, I have a crisis of faith about once a month. For the most part my crises aren’t serious, and they’ve never prompted me to pull away from the community or from observing any mitzvoth. If it was serious, though, if I decided to pull back from Judaism entirely, I know my family would be upset, and my friends would probably worry, but I don’t know anyone who would disown me or stop talking to me if I stopped observing Shabbat.

But if I’d grown up in an ultra-Orthodox community and I suddenly wanted to go secular—well, I’d have to give up on pretty much my entire past. Family, friends, calendar, social structure, I’d have to leave them all behind. And in my new secular life I’d have to learn new social cues, customs, and slang (that’s assuming I had decent English, which isn’t the case for many Hassidim who grow up speaking Yiddish). I’d also have a huge educational deficit. Math, science, and the humanities are a low priority in many ultra-Orthodox schools, which leaves the children with little more than a perfunctory understanding of arithmetic and phonics.
Before and After?
Leaving the fold, then, can be a huge scary thing if you’re from Borough Park, Willamsburg, Bnei Brak or Mea Shearim. And so it makes sense that there’s a group dedicated to helping people make the transition from uber-frum to mostly secular, right?

The group is called Hillel (I can’t find a website for them, but it’s not the same as the Hillel where you went for Friday night dinner in college), and they help young people who were brought up in religious homes get acclimated to the secular world. They pay for housing, and help with education, according to this article in the Jerusalem Post. The article mentions first that Hillel has trouble raising money in Israel because people see them as a “missionaries of secularism,” and then, as an example of a person helped by Hillel, they spotlight “David,” now a career soldier. David attended a secular cousin’s wedding, and then:

‘"That's when my interest in sex began. I used to play hooky from yeshiva and watch sexy movies. I also bought porno magazines."

Hillel helped him get in touch with other formerly religious youth who have become his best friends.’

Is it me, or does the Post make it seem like Hillel is just there to support horny teenagers who want to watch porn? Which, of course, is not what Hillel is about.

I’m not saying I think people should leave their communities because there’s an organization to help them go mainstream, I just think it’s worth it to acknowledge that for some people the ultra-Orthodox lifestyle isn’t the best choice. Jewish communal outreach is important, but don’t we also have to help the people who can’t or won’t live in the Jewish communities they were born into?

(Check out This American Life episode number 268 for a great story about leaving a Hasidic upbringing behind).