The Atheist Rabbi
The Pew Research Center has released its report on patterns of Jewish identity and the leaders of the establishment Jewish community are pushing the panic button.
Here are some highlights from the New York Times:
The intermarriage rate, a bellwether statistic, has reached a high of 58 percent for all Jews, and 71 percent for non-Orthodox Jews — a huge change from before 1970 when only 17 percent of Jews married outside the faith. Two-thirds of Jews do not belong to a synagogue, one-fourth do not believe in God and one-third had a Christmas tree in their home last year.
The most important statistic from my standpoint is the fact that “32% describe themselves as having no religion and identify as Jewish on the basis of ancestry, ethnicity or culture.” Only 15% say that being Jewish is “mainly a matter of religion.” Two-thirds say that “it is not necessary to believe in God to be Jewish.”
The good news? Over 80% say they “are proud to be Jewish.”
Rabbi Andy Bachman of Brooklyn’s Beth Elohim performed an “al chet” (mea culpa) on his blog, “Water Over Rocks.” He makes some interesting, if now clichéd, observations. But most of his analysis completely misses the mark.
First the good parts:
For decades, a person who intermarried was seen as having “given up” on Jewish life. In our community in Brooklyn and certainly in countless Jewish communities everywhere, that is simply not true. Marrying someone *not* Jewish often leads to the couple making Jewish decisions together–for their benefit and enrichment as a couple, and certainly when it comes to raising children….
This approach to intermarriage is the result of reality landing on Jewish religious leaders like a million sacks of bricks. But good for him and them. At least they’ve stopped demonizing intermarried people.
Further on he writes:
When a child moves into adolescence, one of the worst and challenging phases of life, we have a ritual that is as meaningful as it is incomprehensible. Rote memorization is our own worst enemy, since few have a fond memory of it for reading from Torah. But the relationships that can form with a family, when done correctly are indelible.
(Quick plug for Humanistic Judaism: We have no requirement to read from the Torah. We ask the kids to select role models, do comprehensive research about them and share the values they learned from the role model’s life.)
Now the bad parts. And there are many.
A big problem for pretty much all of my non-Humanistic colleagues is that even when they correctly identify a problem of belief, they have no clue how to address it. They don’t even speak the same language as non-religious people.
Here is his response to the irrefutable reality that American Jews are among the world’s greatest disbelievers in God and the supernatural. He advises rabbis to:
Embrace skepticism and doubt. We do such a poor job of not letting people know that the religious exemplars of faith–the Rabbis–had moments of enormous doubt; had questions about divinity and providence that tormented them; and struggled mightily to convey Judaism’s deepest truths through the lens of questioning God, law and authority. American Christian traditions, especially the Evangelical movements which traditionally place faith front and center, have influenced American Judaism to place too great an emphasis on pure faith and I find that, to use a colloquialism, this “turns people off.”
Just a few years ago Reform and Conservative rabbis were pushing for more God talk in their congregations. I never heard that this was because they wanted to be more like the evangelicals! What is he even talking about?! Reform leaders and their prayer books push more and more traditional theism with each passing year. Yesterday Bachman posted a picture of himself wearing tefillin on Facebook. Why’s he wearing tefillin if it’s not about God? It’s certainly not a fashion statement.
But flipping and flopping on God is not the real problem with what he writes here. Like most of his colleagues, Bachman operates from a place of such reverence for the past that he doesn’t even understand that his proposal for addressing the problem is irrelevant.
Why on earth is it useful to me or any other non-believer to know “that the religious exemplars of faith–the Rabbis–had moments of enormous doubt; had questions about divinity and providence that tormented them….”
Guess what? I already know that damn well. I also know that the sources of their doubts could not have been more different (in most ways) from those that brought me to disbelief in God or gods. And the things that returned them to faith are even more irrelevant.
To compound the cluelessness, he goes on to tell us that they used their doubts “to convey Judaism’s deepest truths through the lens of questioning God, law and authority.”
If I understand this correctly, Bachman is saying that doubt is a great part of Jewish heritage. This is because ancient people who lived on a planet that could not be more different than our own had doubts and channeled them into discovering deep “truths.”
This is ludicrous. Those of us who live in the 21st century world of doubt and disbelief are not interested in how some ancient personages who knew exactly NOTHING about how the universe really works used their doubts to get them to more nonsense. And don’t even get me started on the completely ahistorical notion that there are “deeper truths” that they uncovered.
He goes on to say this:
Don’t get me wrong–I am often deeply moved by people’s stories of faith and find them inspiring. But a larger number of American Jews don’t buy it and in an unrelenting string of ages of science and inquiry that stretches back in time nearly 500 years, if not more, we’d do well to honor those who lack faith but want very much to remain part of the Jewish civilizational conversation about truth and justice, love and freedom, right and wrong, kindness and compassion, war and peace. Physics, biology, chemistry, philosophy, psychology, politics and history. These are equally valid constructs of Jewish civilization as faith.
I think that I’m involved in the “Jewish civilizational conversation” about values. Since the conversation that I’d like to have is informed by radical honesty, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that such lovely values are addressable by Jewish conversations alone. In fact, Jewish notions about truth, justice, etc., are characterized by widely varying attitudes that reflect grossly competing agendas. He knows this as well as I do. When Dr. Baruch Goldstein slaughtered 29 Palestinians in 1994 he was lauded by a number of Jews who were intricately involved in a “Jewish civilizational conversation.” They believed his actions to be exemplary of Jewish values. Radical honesty requires us to admit that Jews can find any values they want in our tradition and a lot of them really stink.
Non-Orthodox Jews don’t get their values from a “Jewish civilizational conversation.” At best, a Jewish conversation is a means to speak about UNIVERSAL values while employing a Jewish vocabulary. That’s a cultural asset, but not a religious one. Religion is a dead-end to a useful modern value system.
Bachman attempts to further elevate the practices of Jewish faith (at least his definition of it) by attempting to co-opt sciences like physics, biology, and chemistry as “constructs of Jewish faith,” which they most certainly are not. They have nothing to do with any kind of faith. The scientific method is not a faith-based process.
As for the rest of his list, just off the top of my head I can think of about two dozen Jewish religious perversions of philosophy, psychology, politics and history.
Take history for example. Bachman himself twists the truth about Jewish history right there in the post when he writes:
That Jews are still here on Earth after 3500 years is in large measure because of ritual–the ritual of both sanctifying life *and* the ritual of defending ourselves against people who hate us. Both have been enormously effective tools of self-preservation. You can try to argue and I’ll win.
No, rabbi, you’ll lose, and here’s why. Your premise is absurd. The Jews of 3500 years ago are an utterly and completely different entity than the Jews of today. To the extent that they sanctified life at all (a questionable claim; see Numbers 31 for starters), it was in ways that modern people consider completely primitive.
I might half concede his point about self-defense. Antisemitism certainly contributed to our survival. It contributed a lot. But that was an external factor in Jewish survival. I don’t even begin to understand what he means by “the ritual of defending ourselves.” When we defended ourselves, it had little to do with ritual and a great deal to do with self-empowerment (a real lesson of Jewish history).
Towards the conclusion of his post, he writes about how Judaism can fill a “hunger for deeper connections”:
We promise that we are there for you at birth to welcome a child into the community. That means a name, a bris, a covenantal relationship; it means meals, friendships, a sense of going on a journey through life with others who join a chain of tradition stretching back 3500 years.
If he’s trying to “honor those who lack faith,” this is a funny way to go about it. First of all, it’s based upon a fiction. There is no “chain of tradition stretching back 3500 years.”
Secondly, and more to the point, speaking about “a covenantal relationship” is not a path to the hearts of non-believers any more than suggesting that their non-belief can provide a path to “Judaism’s deepest truths.”
Worse yet, by what “chain of tradition” preserving ritual are we to enter into this imaginary covenant with Yahweh? It is the barbaric practice of infant circumcision.
If he’s looking to honor non-believers, I would suggest that extolling covenants with fictional gods, based on legends masquerading as history and carried out through the vehicle of non-consensual, unnecessary and irreversible ritual genital mutilation may not be the best way to go.
I don’t expect anything that I or any other Jewish humanist could write will make a difference. Mainstream liberal Jews are determined to continue mythologizing Jewish values and history and making claims that do not match the facts. They’ll simply continue to re-package their stale ideas and banal claims in fresh and shiny wrappers, believing that the marketing is the problem and not the substance of their teaching.
According to the Pew report it looks like it’s going very well for them.
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