BEYOND FUNDAMENTALISM (2005)

 

BEYOND FUNDAMENTALISM

“Fundamentalism means taking religion seriously,” a memorable phrase I heard from an Evangelical Christian speaker who had been invited to explain things to a rabbinical conference in the early 90's. He clarified “religion” as: Bible, God’s word revealed for all to follow. Fundamentalists see themselves as the serious ones among us. Their recent rise to Republican status and power challenges us older religious who thought we were the serious ones in matters of justice and peace. We thought we had a corner on conscience. I don’t care for the idea that some folks have hijacked religious terminology and values: faith, love, family, morality. Is such a thing possible? Whatever, I can’t get away from the depressing notion that our commitment pales before theirs. There is a danger here: fundamentalists have just the sort of focus and thinking that demagogues find useful. We had better get back into serious religion.

Jewish fundamentalists, like fundamentalists in other religions, fervently hold and advocate what they consider time honored truth, truth as revealed in the distant past by God to a select individual. Critical thinkers must question such authority, accepting agnosticism in matters beyond the empirical. Few agnostics match a fundamentalists’ fervor but our reliance on knowledge and reason equals theirs on their sacred ancient texts.

Faith is a force, a motivator. We are all of us people of faith of one sort or another. I acknowledge at the outset that Jewish fundamentalists, who, beginning in the 19^th century, call themselves “Orthodox Jews” have more urgent faith than mine which acts for me by laying out attractive options. Their faith insists, demands, they follow the way of Torah. My faith offers good suggestions. The discipline of Torah, the list of actions, that constitute and define Jewish life style we refer to by the classic word: “halachah.” Halachah is a form of the root halach, meaning “walk” or “go”. The Orthodox see halachah as “law,” God’s will expressed in Torah. A few of my student days were in a yeshivah. In Jerusalem. There I first heard, in discussions of observance: “It is impossible to behave otherwise.” The fundamentalists have all the answers; their world makes sense.

Beyond fundamentalism thus becomes a question: Absent the certainty that the way of Torah is God’s will, why go on being Jews? My answer will be that we choose the way of Torah because it is good, good for the individual, the people, and the world. Torah literature contains brilliant insights and fine moral teachings but also primitive and sometimes degrading, harmful ideas. All have contributed to our being who we are. We need not trash even the stories of divinely commanded genocide. From them we learn that we have come a long way, I hope. We can own and treasure our foundation myth, the Sinai revelation, without having it limit our thinking by turning us into fundamentalists. We can build on such a foundation and call the result “metafundamentalism,” signifying acknowledgement and acceptance, continuity and advance.

Metafundamentalists read halachah as a historical, ethnic development, flowing from spiritual experiences, popular wisdom, and thinking about ethics. Consider Shabbat. I know of no better illustration of fundamentalist and metafundamentalist thinking. It’s also my favorite mitsvah.

There is no historical record of how our ancestors invented/discovered the practice of taking one day in seven off but no other ancient nation counted time by weeks. Shabbat appears over and over again among the commandments in the Pentateuch, The Genesis story of the First Week creation makes a weekly day off as natural as sunrise. The Ten Commandments in Exodus says Shabbat is to remind us of God the creator. The Ten Commandents in Deuteronomy says Shabbat is to remind us of the rigors of slavery as in Egypt. Shabbat is quintessential Jewish practice and also a significant contribution to western civilization. Pentateuch, written Torah, prohibits labor on Shabbat. Oral Torah, Talmud, in the interest of shmirat Shabbat, in accordance with God’s intent, specifies acts that constitute labor. The early rabbis produced volumes of definitions of work to be avoided, regulations for Sabbath rest and worship, and a homiletical literature on the subject. An ancient prophet (Is 58:13) spoke of calling Shabbat: “oneg.” The rabbis liked the idea and decreed that the delight should include: best clothing, finest foods, love making. (When I was growing up, “Oneg Shabbat” referred to the coffee and sweets that always followed services.)

So, how should this ancient holy day be part of our lives today? Along comes technology with timers and switches and computers to do the work that shomerei Shabbat want to avoid. Is this OK? Kindling fire on Shabbat is specifically prohibited. Electricity comes from fire so no turning lights or TVs or stoves on or off but what if a timer does it? Elevators can be set to stop at every floor so no one throws any switches. All of this and more is the subject of halachic decision left up to technologically savvy rabbis. For a fundamentalist Jew, Shabbat is a sacred discipline of rest and pleasure, deeply satisfying, with an iron wall separating it from weekdays and protecting it from the work ethic.

I’ll never forget Shabbat among Orthodox Jews. They know how to live. But I am a Reform rabbi son of a Reform rabbi. I love joining with the Orthodox from time to time but I cannot pretend that I am what I am not. Shabbat in my life is the most distinctive of the elements in Jewishness. I am very little different from my Christian neighbors when it comes to tastes, values, politics, sports. But, talk about being different? How about a day off that you don’t use to catch up on chores? And make it Saturday. That’s down right counter cultural! I have no problem finding permission to drive, to turn on the electricity, even the oven, but I’m not going to go shopping at the mall, and I’m not going to bake bread, and I’m not going to mow the lawn or plant the garden on Shabbat. I am determined that Shabbat be kodesh, different from other days. One of my teachers, Reb Zalman, explained it this way: “You say raking leaves is your idea of relaxation? OK, go rake your neighbor’s leaves.” Chores encroach on our best intentions. A world of conformity opposes Shabbat. The work ethic trumps the Shabbat ethic unless we make defensive rules and here we are, back at halachah making rules to keep Shabbat Orthodox and Reform Jews alike want to walk the walk, be it the paved and fenced path of obligation or the shifting path of search. Either way we enjoy the weekly oneg.

Torah, both written and oral, is mostly about actions, mitsvot, as we call them. Abraham Joshua Heschel offered this definition: a mitsvah is linguistically and basically a commandment to do or not to do something specific; second, mitsvah is one of the list of things we do as Jews; third, by derivation, mitsvah is a good deed. We Jews rarely refer to ourselves or to one another as “believers.” We talk about “practicing Jews,” shomrei Shabbat, charitable Jews. We earn points not by what we believe but by what we do. We have beliefs of course, and here is where Torah is emphatically subtle and flexible and even subjective.

In Torah, God is the ultimate answer to all questions about the world: How did we come to be what we are? Why do things happen? What is the source of life? Energy? Love? Of mathematical order? Atheism is nowhere at issue in our ancient literature. At the same time, there is nothing in Hebrew Scriptures that is the equivalent of the modern question: “Do you believe in God.?” or the answer, “I believe in God.” Biblical Hebrew doesn’t even have a good translation for the word “believe.” The authors of Written Torah simply accepted divinity as active in the world, the way we would take for granted, for example, the laws of nature.

But Torah is far from an easy field for a fundamentalist’s search for God. For one thing, till the period of the Babylonian exile, 6^th entury BCE, the Israelites worshiped, in addition to YHVH, Ba’al, Ashtoret, El, and probably other divinities of the time and place. The scribes who eventually collected and retold stories of the judges and kings lived at a time when idolatry was outdated, ignorant, and somehow pernicious. A time when the Ten Commandments were well known. The early rabbis accepting the received narrative order, in which Solomon, along with the rest of our folk, violates Commandment number Three. But the modern reader finds in Bible a collection of writings by our ancestors about their ancestors. The writers projected their ideas onto the characters in their stories. All the fundamentalists I have met insist that they are monotheists, and assume that so were Bible heroes. They read Bible the way partisans read their favorite columnists. A critical reader of Torah can’t help but wonder at the commonness of idolatry in stories of Gideon, of David and Solomon, the sermons of Hosea, the description of conditions in the days of Josiah. We look in vain for any reference to Ten Commandments in these writings. It is as if the Mt Sinai revelation was itself the imagining of later writers, projected upon their ancestor Moses.

Fundamentalists confront a second problem in written Torah: theology, the nature of God. Today’s commonplace that God is omniscient, omnipotent, all good, all loving goes back not to Bible but to the Greek philosophers. Prayers preserved from polytheistic antiquity tell us that each divinity had his or her specialty: fertility, war, health, love, etc. A settled, farming people had different interests from a pastoral, nomadic people. A king needs one kind of god, a citizen needs another kind. Geography made a difference: mountains or maritime, desert or river bed. History affected theology: victory or defeat, wealth or poverty, plenty or famine. Our ancestors did not write about God in systematic, philosophical, universal terms, called theology – another Greek word. They told stories over a period of a millennium or so and we should expect to find widely differing ideas.

Greek mythology is a series of stories about the gods, who, being anthropomorphic, make for an interesting study of human characteristics. Hebrew mythology, on the other hand, is a series of stories about the world and its people, in particular, our people. God, is a character in the stories. What we learn depends on how we understand the stories. Fortunately for us, biblical literary criticism has been around for centuries, about as long as modern science. We needn’t mistake mythology, legend, and lists of rules for science, history, and constitution. We read Bible because it is ours national literature, part of our character. We are curious. How did our ancestors deal with life’s problems? What did they think about the world as it is? Here are a few observations:

1. In Genesis 1, “The First Week,” the world is orderly, purposeful, balanced, predictable, and good. Sex is part of nature, i.e. divine plan. Death is no stranger than birth. God is the intelligent designer Who made it that way by fiat. God transcends the world.

2. In Genesis 2-3, “The Garden of Eden,” the world is chaotic, unpredictable, having been created by trial and error. Sex is knowledge but results from consuming forbidden fruit. Associated with shame. Death is punishment. God is well meaning, emotionally involved, hands-on immediacy, but with no realistic conception of the outcome. God acknowledges his mistakes and attempts to correct them. God is approachable, for example, in prayer.

3. In the book of Judges, triumph or tribulation depends on whether Israel has pleased God or angered God. We call this retribution: God rewards the good and punishes the bad. Bible scholars lable it Deuteronomic thinking because the fifth book of the Torah develops the idea so thoroughly. Deuteronomy is thought to have been composed in the early sixth century BCE, a warning to Jerusalem to desist from the sin of idolatry that led to God’s punishing the northern kingdom, Israel. The prophet Amos, in the eighth century had introduced the concept, warning that God would destroy the nation if the rich kept oppressing the poor.

4. The Book of Job radically challenges the notion of fairness in the world, that a person gets what he deserves, that suffering indicates guilt and prosperity indicates virtue. God is interested in the world but unmoved by human needs. This sounds to me like existentialism, and shows up again in Ecclesiastes and some of the Psalms.

There is no single, official description of God. All are our heritage. Sometimes one makes more sense. Sometimes another. No rabbi says you have to believe this or that about God. In fact, we Jews, when it comes to belief, are more likely to focus on humanism: believing in goodness, peace, justice, progress. I suspect that the fundamentalist accent on God is a popular notion that comes to us by craving certainty in thought as well as action. Time for metafundamentalism.

Metafundamentalism opens us to experience: intellectual discoveries like physics, history, psychology; spiritual effects like praying, awe, mitsvah. For metafundamentalists there can be no issue between science and religion: the one deals in knowledge, the other in values. Scientists study “how” things happen. Religionists, when we consider, say, global warming, study the “why.” As for the argument between “creationism” and evolution that raises such anger and consumes so much energy, the antagonism vanishes once we recognize the two creation stories and appreciate what they are all about.

The spiritual side of our existence, emotions, aesthetics, integrity and security, all flourish when beliefs do not limit our thinking. One of my greatest teachers, Abraham Cronbach, used to say: “The same person can philosophize, theologize, and pray, but should not attempt them at the same time.” Praying, freed from compulsion, stimulates mind and soul with poetry, music, meditation. Following the path of Torah by doing mitsvot constitutes lifestyle. Some of us do more, some less. One mitsvah leads to another by increasing pleasure, and adding meaning to our days and lives.

Metafundamentalism is neither new nor radical among Jews. Building on the variations in Bible, critical thinking rabbis challenge one another. Here’s a story about the thinking of one of the great first century rabbis: (Tanchumah, Chukat)

A certain gentile asked Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai: “These things you do appear to be magic charms – you bring a cow, burn and crush it, and mix the ashes with water. Then when one of you becomes defiled by contact with the dead, you sprinkle on him two or three drops and say, ‘you are purified.’” Yochanan said to him: “Has temporary madness ever entered you?” “No,” was the answer. “Well have you ever seen a person possessed by such a spirit?” “Yes.” “So what do you for him?” The gentile answered, “We bring roots and smoke them under him and sprinkle water on him, and the spirit flees.” Yochanan: “Let your ear hear what your mouth speaks. This spirit is spiritual impurity. We sprinkle him with water of purity and the spirit flees.” Once the gentile had left, his students said to him: “Our master, you drove him away with straw. What would you say to us?” Rabbi Yochanan answered them: “By your very lives, the dead do not defile and the water does not purify! But it’s the decree of the King of kings of kings. Zot chukat haTorah. (Num 19:2) The KBH said, ‘I hereby decree it and you must not transgress.’”

From Maimonides to Heschel, our leading teachers have gone beyond fundamentalism. I think Torah study leads us to open our minds. Jewish fundamentalists doubtless contribute to the vitality of our people. But Israel has been around in one form or another for millennia. Who knows what is yet to come of our way of life? Torah adapts to new thinking, practices shift in new cultures, members of our family sometimes barely recognize one another. Perhaps thats the meaning of am Yisrael chai.