JewsByChoice.Org

Cross-posted on True Ancestor

The short answer: because I’m lazy, because the One True Wife and I had a fight and I didn’t want to travel with her, and because I’m busy.

The longer answer, packed inside the shorter one: I don’t like being part of Jewish efforts at political influence. It’s not a bad thing — in fact, it’s a necessary thing — and I’m glad there are people engaged in it. I’m also glad that I’m not one of them.

The reason is that I think Judaism — more than any religion, any ethical discipline, any race or ethnicity; in fact, more than any other single mode of being — conflates legislation and religion in ways that help the former at the expense of the latter.

I came to realize this reading the text of the Gerson Cohen Memorial Lecture, given by Rabbi Gordon Tucker at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and published in the Winter 2007/08 issue of Conservative Judaism. In this lecture, Rabbi Tucker is clearly talking not about religion and secular law, but about religion and halakhah, or Jewish law. He notes that the tendency to see law as the highest expression of religious practice was the tendency that Spinoza famously identified (and that got him excommunicated) when he said that Judaism was not a religion but a legal system. Centuries later, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel noted that Spinoza’s “doctrine has been coursing through the body of modern Jewish thought like venom.”

In deeply religious communities, the legalistic tendencies of Jewish thought are expressed in painstaking debates over and rulings on halakhah. In more secular Jewish communities, it’s the law of the land, and the establishment of legislative precedents and relationships between nations, that seems paramount.

In other words, as Jews, we have come to see the brief, the ruling, the precedent, the statute as our highest expression of relationship to the Divine. We preserve the sacred at the expense of the living. Rabbi Tucker also quotes the philosopher William James who, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, defined how the path toward the establishment of formal religion can extinguish the very essence and insight it hoped to preserve:

” . . . religious thinkers attract  disciples and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to ‘organize’ themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own.  The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing. . . when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn.  The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration.”

This is the kind of development against which I strain, in spite of myself and in spite of the millennia of Jewish experience. Toward the conclusion of his address, Rabbi Tucker asks a provocative, even radical question, followed by an assertion that’s remarkable for any clergy person, much less a Conservative rabbi:

“But has such a community achieved a glimpse of God, and what God truly wants of us, by ruling out the collective religious intuition?  They have, I submit, resigned themselves to an incomplete loaf.  By failing to admit the necessary incompleteness of our systems, hallowed though they be, to capture the infinite, real essence and will of God, they have sentenced themselves and communities they lead – we might even say the movements that they lead – to existential incompleteness.”

What Rabbi Tucker is saying is hugely important: that we’re incomplete because, in building a fence around the Torah, we’ve kept deep religious intuition and sponteneity — sometimes referred to as prophecy — out of our lives.  That’s what’s missing. That’s what I’m concerned about, even dedicated to.

And that’s the main reason, believe it or not, that I didn’t go to the AIPAC conference.

–T.A.