Too Religious to be Orthodox

This past Shabbat at Ansche Chesed we heard a presentation from Dov Elboim, a well-known Israeli writer, editor and television host, a face of the phenomenon called hazara bi’she’ela, “returning with questions,” a pun meaning “those who left ultra-Orthodoxy.” Dov was recently profiled here in Haaretz. Hebrew readers will also enjoy his excellent book Journey in the Void, a reflection on suffering, longing and his own wrestling with God. [Reviewed here].

Dov’s Friday night TV program Mekablim Shabbat “Greeting Shabbat” on the weekly Torah reading is a hit – at least among that sector of the population who watch TV on Shabbat, but who want to discuss the weekly Parasha. I’m tempted to wonder how many of those can there possibly be. But he said he draws about 10 percent of the Friday night viewing audience. You can see examples on YouTube.

Elboim was here in America connected with his work with the Bina Center for Jewish Culture , a fabulous organization where my own son will be studying next year. (A great organization deserves support.) In my humble opinion, the most critical cultural question in Jewish life is the Jewish character of Israeli life. What Jewish values does Israeli society hold dear? What is its connection to our intellectual and spiritual heritage? What texts and teachings shape the inner life of the “secular” Israeli? What kind of Jew does she or he aspire to be?

Along with a few other organizations, Bina and its incredibly engaging and deep teachers seek to develop a new Jewish language that will permit so-called “secular” people to build meaning through an engagement with classical Jewish sources. The woeful Judaic ignorance on the part the secular majority is – to borrow a term from the political realm – an “existential threat” to Jewish society. We liberal American Jews are also vastly ignorant. But of course the Israelis speak Hebrew, which is both worse (more indefensible) and better (more easily remedied).

But public ignorance is maybe only 49 percent of the problem. It is matched by the inappropriateness of the conventional religious vocabulary, which bars the “secular” population from the richness of the Jewish religious tradition. Jewish life is all too fragmented in Israel, with precious little contact among different population sectors, and precious little exposure to Torah discourse in a compelling way.

What does Torah have say to the lives of people who are not conventionally observant? In truth, EVERYTHING. But you wouldn’t know it from Israeli public life. The spokespeople for the religious tradition are all too often associated with the fanaticism, superstition, bigotry and hypocrisy of ultra-Orthodox enclaves, and the messianism and triumphalism of religious Zionism, difficult to extricate from right-wing politics. How is any one supposed to discover the subtlety, depth and humanism in the Torah from those guys?

My Israeli religious heroes include those of the religious Zionist center-left – still kicking, in a few hardy corners – and especially the folks around secular initiatives like Bina, who are striving to develop a whole new language for talking about Torah and religion. This language won’t resolve into simplistic binary questions about authority: do you or don’t you submit to Jewish law? It won’t be a reactionary loyalty to traditional norms. And by the way, I am loyal to traditional norms. But I don’t think the ultimate point of religion is conformity.

The point instead is to discover the spiritual and moral aspirations within our norms, and apply them to our world and to our lives.

On this point, Elboim said one of the best things I ever heard. This past Shabbat, someone asked him about why he left his own ultra-Orthodox world as a high schooler. “I was too religious to be Orthodox,” he replied.

He meant, I think, that life and Torah hold too much sacred possibility to be exhausted by microscopic conformity to rules – even holy and beautiful rules – in self-segregated “gated communities.” And that life is too full of meaningful sanctity to be restricted to what we conventionally call “religious observance.” (Admittedly, if it is to be Jewish it must find expression in shared communal norms and deeds. These new Torah norms are still forming.)

We all still only stammer this new vocabulary. Words like hiloni/”secular” and dati/”religious” are overly crude binaries to describe what I, at least, would like to see the Jewish people learn to become. We’ve only begun to discover life’s latent possibilities for that special mix of virtue, refinement, spiritual aspiration, social responsibility, learning and worship worthy of the name Torah.

That’s what I aspire to, at any rate. At my best, I should be fortunate to emulate Elboim and be “too religious to be Orthodox.”

Yom HaAtzmaut, 5772

A variety of important/inspiring/challenging things have made it through across my screen for Yom Ha’Atzmaut. I’d like to share some with you.

A truly inspiring figure and one of the great rabbis in Orthodox America, R. Yosef Blau – the “Spiritual Guide” or Mashgiach Ruchani at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical seminary – spoke a year ago of the power of meeting Palestinians and hearing their own narratives, through the Encounter Program. Here is a report about it, including a video of his speech at the 2011 Encounter fundraising dinner. Yes, you can be an empathetic and universalist Zionist.

Leonard Fein has been “curating” a discussion on the Huffington Post called Liberal Zionists Speak Out. It is quite stimulating. We Liberal Zionists have been most embattled and this conversation needs to be broadcast widely, affirming the ethical standing of Jewish peoplehood, and our need for political sovereignty in a world where not that long ago our enemies murdered millions of us and where real enemies continue to see us as little better than “Jewish Arabs” who should do well to live as a minority in an Islamic state. But the sad but real transformation is that a liberal Zionism of most of the 20th century gave way to a right-wing Zionism of the late 20th century. Myself, I still believe in a liberal Zionism, sensitive both to the claims of Jewish destiny, Jewish cultural commitments and those of our neighbors, both those who are citizens of the state and those who are subject to its rule. Anyway, you’ll enjoy most of these articles, including those by Muki Tsur, Michael Walzer, Stuart Schoffman and Ruth Gavison.

An important discussion in Israel happened this year regarding Hatikva, the national anthem. Supreme Court Justice Salim Jubran stood in silence as Hatikva was played, causing national apoplexy. But, as Bibi Netanyahu recognized, it is not fair to expect an Israeli Arab to sing with reverence the words “as long as a Jewish soul longs within the heart … “

What can Israeli citizenship mean to the 20% who are non-Jewish? The Forward has taken up this question with an interesting proposal about the text of the national anthem, as advanced by their columnist Philologos. That pseudo-nonymous writer is no post-Zionist leftist, but a true paleo-Zionist ideologue, who presses the question of the multi-cultural components of the Jewish state. The Forward site has Neshama Carlebach singing the revised words. See what you think. Compare this to the version sung by survivors in Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

Finally, let me offer you an old poem by an old poet, Yehuda Karni, an early immigrant, an early editor of HaAretz, who died in 1949. A moving piece of romantic retro-Zionism, longing to become a single stone in a wall of safety in a rebuilt Israel. I feel it.

Put me in the breach, like every other rolling stone
Fasten me strongly with a hammer
Perhaps I may atone for my homeland and pay off
The sin of a people who has not mended it ruins.

How good to know that I am a stone like every other stone of Jerusalem
How fortunate I am, for my bones are bound into the wall
For why should my body be any less than my soul, which in fire and water
Walked along with its people, screaming and silent?

Take me with all the Jerusalem stones, and place me into the walls
Cover me with mortar
And as they wear away within the wall, my bones will sing
To greet the Messiah.

How Do We Mark Yom HaShoah?

Another Yom HaShoah has come and gone, now 67 years since the end of World War II. Not that in all those years we’ve gotten it just right when it comes to marking these most overwhelming events in all the 4,000 years of the Jewish people. I think about this a lot, as a synagogue rabbi trying to program something moving and intelligent each spring.

How should a synagogue community mark Yom HaShoah?

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s *Zakhor* made us pay attention to the uneasy alignment of Jewish “history” – empirical, critical research into the past – and “memory” – emotionally and culturally laden bonds we share with people who lived long ago, who are dead but never really gone, whose lives we carry forward. Contemporary Jews marking the Shoah almost always stumble as we weave history & memory. Too much historical analysis, and we’re really just examining cadavers. But it is so easy to slide into manipulative sentimentality, and our nostalgic veneration of a supposedly authentic, saintly Eastern Europe. No thank you.

Then there are the problems of theology, politics and ethics. Bringing God into the conversation is totally necessary and totally impossible. As R. Eliezer Berkovits said in *Faith After the Holocaust*, it is blasphemy against the God of Israel to fail to ask where He was while His children were being slaughtered. Yet no religious answer makes more than fragmentary sense of the extreme bestiality of the Nazis and their friends. Certainly no answer can be compelling enough for our communities to davven it together as a faith statement. Politically, too often the Shoah becomes a spade to dig with, merely a pretext to talk about Iran or the Palestinians or Pat Buchanan. On the ethical front, you cannot cede either the Jewish meaning of these events or the universal ones. It is bizarrely deracinated to mark the obliteration of European Jewish civilization by talking about Darfur. Yet it is bizarrely self-assertive to talk about *einsatzgruppen*without considering the moral imperative to fight further mass murders. As Ruth Messinger of AJWS likes to say: “*Never Again* cannot mean *Never again should Germans kill Jews in the 1940s*.” All true. All difficult.

How should we mark it? The old stand-by – a survivor sharing his or her story – is in its final act. There are about 200,000 survivors in Israel and about 125,000 in America (according to various newspaper accounts). The youngest camp survivors would be in their 80s, and hidden children would have to be 70. About 12,000 survivors died in Israel last year, or an average of one every 44 minutes. We are the last generation that will hear from them in person.

At Ansche Chesed last year (2011) we had an exceptional presentation from the historian Sam Kassow about his book “Who Will Write Our History“ on the Oyneg Shabbos archives, the efforts by Warsaw Ghetto residents to document the misery going on around them, and the efforts at spiritual survival.

This year we followed up by showing *A Film Unfinished”, an amazing edition of Nazi propaganda footage taken in the Warsaw Ghetto in May, 1942, interleaved with contemporary interviews and additional material. The Nazi film aims to portray rich Jews ignoring the starvation of their poor brothers and sisters as they lived in luxury. The Nazis abandoned the project, apparently because the real cause of all the misery – the sidewalks full of corpses, the courtyards full of human feces, the people in dressed in rags – was all too obvious. Ghetto survivors, now in their 70s and 80s are shown here watching the film, pointing out individuals they recognize among the footage, fearing they will see images of their own parents. People have posted the whole film on Youtube, but I recommend you buy it. Here is a trailer.

Most haunting for me were two things: First, the Nazi camera’s focus on so many *faces* of the Ghetto residents. When you say the number *6 million, *how difficult it is to think of individuals. But staring into these faces – a mix of rich, well-fed faces, and gaunt, starving, scarred, grotesquely suffering faces – is a harrowing experience. As I looked at those faces, I thought to myself – this film is shot in May 1942. Within four months, by September of that year, most of you will have been gassed at Treblinka. You and you and you and you and you are all headed for the *brausebad* and then it will be over. This visual experience was helpful for absorbing the Shoah not as a pile of 6 million dead bodies, but as a passing parade of 6 million living people.

That is the same reason I find very moving the all-night reading of names, as we do here on the Upper West Side every Yom HaShoah. Reading the long list of names, I try to imagine something about these people. I try to imagine the person that goes with this name … let’s say Mordecai Goldberg, Sarah Cohen … attending school, playing childhood games, getting married, giving birth, mourning a loved one.

The other intensely moving part of the film had to do with food and hunger. One scene of the film, apparently a propaganda trope, shows a ghetto resident arranging flowers in a vase. To which one of the survivors comments: “Flowers? When were there ever flowers? If we had one, we would have eaten that flower.” You see scenes in this film that you never see in the worst urban poverty in America. True starvation and people too weak to move. At one point a man takes out a spoon and scrapes something off the pavement to eat it. (Similarly, you see what it looks like when people are literally dressed in rags – literally bags of rags – something you never see even among the saddest NYC street people.) When the film was being shot there were 4,000-5,000 people dying per month in the ghetto, dozens every day, their corpses left in the streets overnight for circulating burial squads to pick them up and lay them into mass graves (also shown in the film).

I came away from these images with a renewed sense of gratitude for the mind-bogglingly abundant food that we have in this country, a renewed desire to recite blessings for every morsel of food I enjoy, and a renewed desire to feed this country’s poor. As I like to, I gave to two of my favorite food organizations, the West Side Campaign Against Hunger in New York and Meir Panim in Israel.