Your Humble Blogger belongs to a shul. That’s right, an actual membership, with High Holidays tickets and all, just like a grown-up. It’s a great shul, with a great rabbi, and I’m learning a lot and thinking a lot, and all manner of good things. One of those good things is that there’s a book club, which I suppose is fairly common, or should be. The rabbi suggested that I would enjoy the discussion of the August book, which was Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, by Douglas Rushkoff.
Mr. Rushkoff has, I would say, three or four major points to make in this book. First, he claims that American Judaism has lost its way, and that most Jews and certainly most non-Jews find it irrelevant and meaningless. Second, he claims that this is because they have institutionally denied the spirit of free inquiry and disputation that is and always has been at the core of Judaism. Third, that we should bring the core ideas of Judaism to the world, not by proselytizing for the religion but by pushing those ideas (which he describes as iconoclasm, abstract monotheism, and social justice) independent of the rituals and the theology. Fourth, that we should reinvigorate our look at the rituals and at scripture by an iconoclastic, open, rigorous, historically minded, context-aware, practical, disputation-based approach that he calls Open Source Judaism.
OK, I agree with, well, much of that, at least in a way. So I should like this book, right? Nope. This book irritated me more than I can easily express on-line. I like the idea of studying Scripture with an eye toward context and an open mind, but when he actually does examine some Scripture (which is a very small portion of the book), he botches it immensely. The first example that made me shout aloud was when he called the Egyptian religion (from which the Exodus, um, exuded) a death cult. No, it wasn’t.
Then he said that “such myths [as the ten plagues and the Angel of Death] weren’t taken literally until very recently.” (p. 93) Really? Does he really think that, say, Hillel didn’t believe that the plagues actually happened? Does he really think that the Rambam didn’t believe that the plagues actually happened? What evidence does he have for that? I understand that they may have understood them as symbolic in addition to their having happened, or more likely believed that they were caused to happen in a symbolic way. And it’s enough for the argument to say that the rabbis didn’t stop at taking them literally, and that we don’t have to stop there, either; adding in patently false claims unnecessary to the case makes Your Humble Blogger very cross. It would be like, I don’t know, like forging documents to verify the obvious fact that the son of the Envoy to China (or the head of the RNC, or whatever he was at the moment) received special treatment. You ain’t helpin’.
Hm, I’ll quote from a note I sent to my rabbi:
I found it a frustrating book, mostly because I think that Rushkoff is right about what he wants to do, but doesn't do it very well. Almost every time he gets down to actually doing the kind of scripture study he talks about, he comes up with something I find misreads the text, misreads the commentaries, and misreads the history. And yet, I completely agree with him that many Jewish 'institutions' have lost the urge to even engage in that kind of study, settling for bizarre and neurotic racial and political self-idolatry, as he puts it, making 'Judaism' more important than Torah. That doesn't mean, though, that the culture I grew up in is something I should slough off, even if I, in my arrogance, have 'seen through' it.
There are lots of things I disliked about the book: his contempt for any belief less abstract than Spinoza’s, his dismissal of cultural heritage as being worth protecting, his vicious attacks on synagogues and Jewish groups and charities. But let’s concentrate on the positives, of which there were many. First of all, I agree with the general idea of opening out disputation, both within the congregation in a faith setting and outside it in a secular or even an ecumenical setting. I agree with the emphasis he places on social justice as a primary Jewish concern. I agree with the sense that ‘iconoclasm’ as he puts it, or what I would call an open hierarchy, or a willingness to challenge anything said by anybody including the Lord, is a celebrated part of Jewish religion and culture. I agree with him that Zionism was bad for Jews. And I’m glad as all heck that my shul picked this book to discuss; the fact that it did argues against much of his opinion of the state of Judaism.
There were other things that I found provocative, with which I have not yet agreed nor disagreed, and that’s good, too. He claims that ‘Judaism’ has become an idol, and I think there’s much to that, particularly as we get distracted from Torah by yiddish, Yentl, and yellow stars. He claims that ‘Jews’ have become an idol, and although I think there is much to that as well, I also understand that I do want what’s best for Jews, and that I feel a kinship to Jews that I do not want to give up. And, of course, with his radical monotheism, he brings up again the question of what Scripture is, and why we study it. I’m unsatisfied with his answer, but then I’m dissatisfied with my own.
Oh, and it turned out we couldn’t attend the book group, after all. Feh.
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-Vardibidian.