The Atheist Rabbi
Well, the consensus among my friends and the few of you who posted here or on Facebook is that snark is okay in small doses.
Moving on, here is my “Round 2” letter to Rabbi Fred Klein in our continuing exchange. He has received it and is working on his response. Here is a link to “Round 1” where both of our first letters are posted.
Exchange #2, From Rabbi Falick to Rabbi Klein:
Dear Fred,
The response to our first exchange, as you know, was quite interesting. I actually did not expect the challenges to your “kashrut” as an Orthodox rabbi. I’m glad we got all of that out of the way. Our dialogue is best framed as a discussion about theism and all the fine (or blunt) points about what qualifies as “true Orthodoxy” are of little relevance in this context.
Now to the heart of our discussion.
Though you approached them in an indirect manner, you did indeed answer the questions I posed in my first letter. I am quite pleased that you began with Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. His book, Zakhor, had an important impact on me. Every serious modern Jew must somehow confront the “rupture” (as he and you put it) brought about by historical discoveries and the overturning of myth.
Yerushalmi captures what I believe is the key challenge presented by modern Jewish historical research. It is also the most relevant to our dialogue:
To the degree that this historiography is indeed “modern” and demands to be taken seriously, it must at least functionally repudiate premises that were basic to all Jewish conceptions of history in the past. In effect, it must stand in sharp opposition to its own subject matter, not on this or that detail, but concerning the vital core: the belief that divine providence is not only an ultimate but an active causal factor in Jewish history, and the related belief in the uniqueness of Jewish history itself (p. 89). [Emphasis added.]
He was correct to identify this is as the vital core. Among all of our analyses of what changed in Jewish life, this is the outstanding issue. As our historians have re-created the actual experiences of the Jews, the major character of our mythos is missing from what has emerged. Not only is he absent, he is no longer required in order to explain anything.
I was pleased to see that you so readily acknowledged this. Yet the story you tell of the student from Brooklyn takes it all back. I am firmly with Yerushalmi in believing that we cannot have it two ways. Moses de Leon and Shimon bar Yohai cannot both be the authors of the Zohar. It doesn’t matter where you live or what you wish for. Moses de Leon wrote it.
No amount of refusal to accept the facts of history will make them disappear. We simply know too much.
You state that I, as an existentialist (I suppose I am) “have decided to stoically accept this reality.” Well, of course I have accepted reality. Not stoically, but joyfully. I will return to that joy later in this letter. First I would like to address some of your other points.
You assert that “religious thinking is intrinsic” to human beings. This is not universally accepted as true. That it is commonplace may have many causes. One of these is that we are clearly pattern seeking creatures. This was long ago established by psychological research. We are also extremely susceptible to confirmation bias. The interaction of the two, which either evolved for a purpose or were the secondary consequences of an evolved trait, opens us up to all kinds of nonsense.
Initially, without the proper tools at our disposal, we saw in these patterns the signs of the divine. It explained our origins and our present circumstances. It was also easily exploited by both the well-intentioned and those who sought power.
More to the point of our conversation, these characteristics were responsible for the creation of sacred narrative. For a certain time and place it did “provide meaning, normative purpose and direction.” However, not one of these utilitarian aspects made it true. Once its truth was called into question, the proponents of the sacred narrative took on a new role. They became hyper-apologists and defenders of the true faith.
No matter what science or history revealed, traditional religion either stood fast in rejection or was dragged kicking and screaming into an acceptance of reality. The responses of the religious have been varied. Some have crawled up into their caves of ignorance and denied anything that threatened their narratives. Others have tried unsuccessfully to reconcile them.
Then came another rupture, both for the Jews and everyone else. But especially for the Jews.
As if reality were somehow “piling it on,” everyday folks became increasingly aware of the narrative’s lack of applicability to their modern lives or the world as it presented itself to them.
This present difficulty arose from two interactions with the new reality. The first was the self-conscious realization that moral evolution is out-pacing the sacred narrative. First it was slavery. Then the treatment of women. Today it’s reflected in attitudes toward homosexuality. There are others. They each point to the fact that we flesh and blood humans have become more moral than our narrative. It wouldn’t matter to us with any other ancient myth or story, but the sacred narrative claims timeless objective moral authority.
Now it is true that no narrative is static, least of all that of the Jews. We have always displayed the ability to read our moral progress backward into the text (lex talionis, for example). This time, however, it’s not working so well. When contrasted with the real world, the sacred narrative has demonstrated that it is no longer up to the task.
The second interaction with reality was more traumatic and, for us Jews, more decisive. It came in the form of the Holocaust. For the first time in modern history, the traditional narrative could not absorb the event. It wasn’t simply that the Holocaust was sui generis; past events left us equally traumatized.
No earlier ordeal, however, had occurred subsequent to the emancipation and the scientific revolution. Yerushalmi himself describes how the expulsion from Spain was assimilated into the meta-narrative (pp. 72 ff.). Not so the Holocaust. In our current condition, there is no convincing integration of the Holocaust into traditional collective Jewish memory.
There have certainly been attempts. I will not enumerate them here, but they tend to range from the esoteric to the insulting. Not one of them provides an acceptable account for the bottom-line question: Where was God?
Simplistic answers offered in the past no longer suffice. No rabbinic poetry about how we were condemned to this because of our sins can provide a sense of meaning, purpose or direction. The event was too enormous. The absence of God as a “vital actor” too chillingly obvious. If the sacred narrative is supposed to provide meaning and purpose, it failed utterly and completely. Those who have fallen back on outdated methods of locating the event’s meaning and purpose for Jewish history deserve the derision that they typically receive.
Of course there are others, and perhaps you are one of them, who have simply re-cast the narrative or informed us that we never really understood it correctly to begin with. I can take on each of these in greater detail another time. For now it is enough to say that, not unexpectedly, most of these efforts begin by first castrating the main character. God, we are now told, does not intervene in Jewish or human affairs.
But doesn’t he? Is this not the “vital core” of which Yerushalmi wrote? These attempts amount to eliminating the main character from the entire plot line!
Instead of at long last accepting the conclusions of science, historiography and experience, these thinkers promote a brand new God and a shiny new re-write of the narrative. Needless to say, it resonates with many who are desperate to save God from reality.
For others it does not.
We accept that neither the sacred narrative nor its protagonist can possibly make sense of it. Without anger and without despair, we have relieved them both of this unfair burden. They are no longer up to the job and their services are no longer required. If no previous event could give them the boot, Auschwitz took care of it once and for all.
Now that those in my camp have abandoned the sacred framework of the Jewish narrative, it is our job to help locate new sources of purpose, meaning and direction. This time, it must conform to reality. If the Jews are still searching for a mission, I’d like to nominate this one. Maybe we can show the world what happens when you stop organizing life around legends and begin to arrange it in accord with reality.
This is hard work. Reality is cruel. It is purposeless. It is a tiny blue dot in the middle of an endless nothingness punctuated by other tiny dots of light and matter.
Yet when we pull in for a closer look, it is a magnificent and rare gem and our lives are precious gifts. No one gave us these gifts, but as a pattern seeking and self-aware species, we may call them gifts. Alleviated of the burden to mesh the sacred narrative with the newly uncovered reality, we are free to make of our lives what we wish. That fills us with joy.
We are now welcome to define for ourselves, within certain parameters, our meaning and purpose, both as individuals and as part of a collective. We can enjoy life here and now without any regard or fear of what comes after. Our messianic age is ours to design.
By placing ourselves firmly in nature as creatures who evolved to be socially interdependent, we will continue our moral development. We will also expand our mutually agreed upon obligation to help others, too, live meaningful lives of their choosing. We will comfort and provide relief for each other in times of tragedy. Our chief concern should be the achievement of individual and collective well-being. Our moral instincts, codified as laws and mores, will guide our relationships with others and provide constraints on our own aspirations where they may cause damage. None of these mandates (mitzvot?) are issued from on high or subservient to ancient texts. They are simply the result of many years of our species’ shared knowledge and experience of what we need in order to flourish.
I look forward to your reply.
Sincerely,
Jeff
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