Benjamin Rosenbaum has written a long and magnificent post called On “The Stain of Sin” which is on, er, The Stain of Sin, a long and ... fascinating blog post by Hal Duncan, one in a series of fascinating posts about monotheism and so on. I don’t read Hal Duncan’s blog, in part because it is too provocative; it makes me want to respond to him in terms I don’t want to respond to him, as I don’t know him and find this interblog thing hinders communication in some ways, and I just generally don’t think either Mr. Duncan or myself would enjoy the exchange much.
Anyway.
Mr. Rosenbaum, who comes from a slightly different strain of Judaism than I do, talks a good deal in his post about Jewish ideas of sin and repentance and community and Scripture and monotheism and all that stuff. And in it he says something that I think is terribly important about the ways Jews represent themselves to Christians, and the way Christians represent Jews to themselves.
See, if I had to pick between the religion of the ancient Israelites and, oh, orthodox Stalinism, I expect I'd pick gulags and purges and show trials over public stonings and immolations and the slaughter of whole towns by the sword for being the wrong tribe.
Luckily, though, that isn't the Judaism I'm stuck with, since the history of Judaism is a history of continually rewriting and reimagining the meanings of its texts, maintaining its connection to them, but often completely changing their meanings, weight, and resonance.
It seems to me that both Christians and Jews participate in a story where there were Jews first and then there were Christians. This is crap. Both Christianity and Judaism came from responses to the destruction of the Temple and the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem. Yes, there is a substantial sense in which rabbinic Judaism included a direct community-based sense of continuity with Temple Judaism, and Pauline Christianity took it on the road, but Christianity didn’t branch off from the rabbinic Judaism branch but from the trunk. That means you can’t work your way back from Christianity to Judaism, you can only work back to the trunk and then forward to Judaism.
Note: I’m using the term Judaism to mean modern Judaism deriving from Medieval diaspora European and North African Judaism, encompassing all of Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstruction, Hasidic, Ethical and Radical Monotheistic Judaisms, possibly including some Messianic Judaism much as I hate to admit it and not knowing much about it. I’m using the term Christianity to encompass all the Christianities deriving from the Medieval church and its offshoots. I know that all these are different, one to another, and that to lump them into those two categories is to make an error of exactly the type I am attempting to explicate. Having acknowledged this error, I will continue to make it. End Note.
This means that there are lots of things that are absolutely fundamental to Judaism that Christianity never took part in, never was influenced by, and seems to be unable to quite see. Thus, Hal Duncan, in lumping the two together in talking about monotheism, talks vibrantly about Scriptural stuff and pre-Scriptural stuff and various connotations of it, but doesn’t talk about rabbinic stuff. The conception of sin and the conception of ritual cleanliness are very interesting in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and that language (in translation, mostly) has had a substantial influence on how Jews think about sin. Not as much influence as the conception of sin and ritual cleanliness in the Mishnah, though. Nowhere near as much influence as the conception of sin and ritual cleanliness in the Talmud. So he winds up getting a totally wrong idea of those conceptions, because, I think, fundamentally he sees Jews as proto-Christians, as a historical artifact, from a time before Christianity.
This is wrong.
And it’s our fault. We did it, Morty. Yes, with a lot of help from Christian theology, and thank you Paul, but we also made a nice little myth about ourselves and tied it in to the remnant theology that gets so far up my nose it makes me spit. And, of course, the most visible Jews, that is, the Jews you can see from the furthest away and recognize as Jews, are the ones who are frozen artifacts of shtetl fashion, and who seem sometimes to think that Abraham wore a long black coat and a wool fedora. So, yes, our bad. But it’s still wrong.
What’s my point, here. It’s clear that Judaism and Christianity have a lot in common, starting with a lot of Scripture. It’s clear that Judaism and Christianity influenced each other over the centuries, and that Jews read Augustine and Christians read the Rambam, and that the whole two-branches-from-a-trunk is as bad an analogy as you might imagine. Perhaps it’s more like England and the US; there’s this pretence that the US doesn’t have monarchy in its history, and that England does, and this pretence that England’s Parliament is old and the US is new, although the US method of selecting members and our rules for passing laws is older than that over there. We both are who we are in large part because of what happened in Britain before 1605, yes, but more because of who we are since then. Not in isolation, but not the same, either.
I’ve whinged before about how my fundamental understanding of the Jews boils down to we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. And I will still say that, because it’s true, and it’s true to myself the way I understand it. And that story is part of both Judaism and Christianity. But it’s also true, as Mr. Rosenbaum points out, that you could boil the story of the Jews down to the Temple was destroyed, so we wrote the siddur. And that part isn’t.
That's the birth of my religion. Abraham, yes, Moses, yes, David, why the hell not, Isaiah, damned straight.... but really it's Rabbi Yochanan. During the last seige of Jerusalem, while the rest of the Judaean Zealots were ready to fight to the death with the Romans, swords and spears and macho battle cries, ready to die for the return of the Kingdom, for the Temple, for the priesthood, Yochanan had himself smuggled out of the city in a coffin. He went straight to Vespasian and he talked him into sparing a little university town, Yavneh; and there, when the Temple was in ruins and the macho guys had died bravely, they started Rabbinic Judaism -- a decentralized religion of eternal argument. A religion fundamentally characterized by its ambivalence toward tradition. On the one hand, it's precious -- it's all the work we've done so far, it's what we've preserved of our encounter with the Divine, it's our glimpse of that Eternal Law. And on the other hand, it's pretty clear that it can't mean what it seems to say on the surface. So it's a mystery -- and we'd better get all our heads together, all of us equal, and start applying both sober analysis and midrash, crazy imagination, fiction -- to figure it out.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
Great post! Thank you.
Much of what you have said about the importance of a tradition of interpretation to the history and nature of Judaism applies to Christianity as well, though it appears to me that, on the whole, the main Jewish traditions have done a better job of being up front about the fact that the work of the present is to _interpret_ and respond to the past, not to perpetuate exactly a fixed and eternal tradition. Christian sects have generally interpreted and responded to the past while pretending or even fervently believing that nothing is changing. Not always, but often.
Hiding the fact that what you are really doing is interpreting and revising tradition rather than simply (to borrow from another thread) following “the rules” creates a rigid duality in thought: one can either accept tradition, “the rules,” in their entirety, or one can reject these things in their entirety. The possibility of an approach that accepts but revises tradition is not acknowledged.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this area recently because of the meeting of the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards about gay marriage and ordaining gay rabbis. Their decisions will be widely followed (when they get around to making decisions), except that they won’t actually be followed by anyone who disagrees with them. Even among rabbis.
I think the Conservative movement is shifting (or has shifted) from Rabbinic Judaism to Congregational Judaism. To be meaningful as a term, Rabbinic Judaism should include communities which look to their rabbis as possessing some authority, and rabbis who look to folks like the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards as possessing some authority. We are past that point. When a congregation doesn’t like an answer from their rabbi, they get a new rabbi. The rabbi is hired to perform various functions, but the power rests with the congregation. And when a rabbi doesn’t like an answer from the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the rabbi does as he or she (ultimately meaning the congregation) pleases.
At the same time that this shift has been happening, Conservative Judaism has decisively lost its place as the majority branch of Judaism to Reform Judaism. (And Reform Judaism has changed to be much more comfortable for Conservative Jews seeking a change.) I think these are very related, as is the dramatic increase in interfaith marriage.
I was going to respond that we shouldn’t exaggerate the extent to which Rabbinic Judaism was focused on the Rabbi. That is, the congregation has always had the option of firing the Rabbi. There is ordination, of course, although the great Rabbanim were mostly self-ordained, or ordained through a discipleship that was to a Rabbi, not to a council. The Rabbi was always given authority by the people who paid him to teach them, and so they could always disagree, and in disagreeing, get rid of one and get another.
And then I thought that we shouldn’t exaggerate the extent to which Temple Judaism was focused on the Temple. Because it wasn’t, much, unless you happened to live near Jerusalem. And yet it makes sense to talk about Temple Judaism anyway. So perhaps you are right that we are seeing another shift, a shift away from Rabbinic authority (whatever its derivation) and to what you call Congregational Judaism and what Douglas Rushkoff calls Open Source Judaism. Hm.
And to Chris, I should say that lots and lots of Judaisms do pretend or even believe that nothing is changing, and always have. I have, I think, related more than once in this Tohu Bohu the anecdote that Elie Wiesel told about meeting a friend from his Carpathian village. The friend was dressed like their fathers and grandfathers; Mr. Wiesel was dressed in a modern suit. It was implied that the two had been in the concentration camp together, but at any rate both had lived through the destruction of the culture they had inhabited. “Nu, has nothing changed, then?” asks Mr. Wiesel, to which his friend replies, “How can the Torah change?”
Thanks,
-V.
Thanks for the response, V.
I think you come close to making the same error you are alerting us to in this offhand phrase:
the ones who are frozen artifacts of shtetl fashion
…though you redeem it with the word “fashion”. Because I think fashion is the primary way in which the Haredim are any kind of “frozen artifacts”. In fact, they are in many ways theological innovators (think of the shockingly daring Lubavitcher campaign to redefine the notion of Moschiach as the old Rabbi Schneerson neared death — the yellow bumper stickers filling Israel that proclaimed “prepare for the coming of the messiah”).
One of the most startling innovations in the development of haredi Judaism is the miracle-working, hereditarily sovereign Hasidic Rebbe-Tzaddik and the scope of his authority over his followers’ lives. Combined with increasing skepticism about the role of reason in exegesis, this sort of constitutes “the religion that was hijacked by geeks from monarchists” being re-hijacked by monarchists again.
It’s a fair cop, although I think to some extent even the Lubavitchers, as Chris said, pretended or even fervently believed that nothing was changing, that is, that their redefinitions were in some way a return to old ones. But I don’t actually know much about the last years of the Rebbe.
But my point was more the visibility, that the image of Jewishness is an image of old-ness, of a refusal to change, insofar as the image of Jewishness is the image of the Hasid. To me, of course, it’s Mel Brooks, or my father, if you can tell the difference between them these days. But I suspect for most American non-Jews, it’s the Hasid.
Thanks,
-V.