The Verein Group has been one of the more worthwhile synagogue endeavors I have been involved in, and I am grateful to Ralph and to Richard for organizing these sessions. I have learned a great deal from them and from the other participants. And while I recognize the importance for a Jewish person to understand his or her individual theology, I would respectfully suggest that in some sense, this is the wrong question and based on the wrong premise.
When I say the wrong premise, I don’t mean to suggest that anything this group has done is misguided. What I mean is that we have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) been taught to treat being Jewish as a “religion,” a category that I do not believe accurately describes what Jewish identity is or how Jews actually understand their own identity.
One example may illustrate my point. If I said that “Albert Einstein was Jewish, and he was an atheist,” very few, if any Jewish person, no matter what their affiliation, would find that statement to be incongruous. Someone who thought that Judaism was a “religion,” including many Christians, would think that the statement was illogical, or, at best, that Einstein was a “bad” Jew.
The terminology that assumes that Judaism is a “religion” has seeped into Jews’ own sense of self. A Jew who is not traditionally observant might call himself or herself a “bad” Jew—a statement that assumes that one’s Jewish identity can be quantified based on how much or little traditional observance or supposedly traditional belief one has.
Another premise of such a statement is that what we call “Orthodox” Judaism is somehow more “authentic” than other forms of being Jewish. Another way to describe this premise is that until recent times, “everyone was Orthodox,” which was the normative Jewish identity, and Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and other types of Judaism are well-intentioned and sincere but are modifications of “authentic” Judaism, when all Jews “believed in God.”
The idea that Orthodox Judaism is more “authentic” and is the way that “everyone was Jewish” until the Reform and (later) Conservative movements “broke away” is, from an objective and empirical standpoint, ahistorical and incorrect. All of these movements arose in particular historical contexts and to address particular circumstances affecting the Jewish people—the Haskala and later the Reform movement when Enlightenment ideas began to spread in Europe; Orthodoxy when other Jews perceived the Reform movement as a threat to traditional authority; and the Conservative movement in response to the circumstances American Jews found themselves in during the 20th Century. Jews continue to define themselves with reference to these movements, and they obviously have an objective social reality, but the idea that one is more “authentic” than the other could not be further from the truth. To my mind, being Jewish has always been, and still is, an identity, a sense of being part of a civilization, a people, or, for want of a better word but perhaps a useful analogy, a nation. Since ancient times, that nation has been unique in the world. As we read in the Tanach, in its memories and traditions, this nation described itself as having its own territory for a thousand years or so, although after a few hundred of those years, a majority of the nation lived outside that territory and developed traditions and institutions to survive as a nation in exile. And in the early part of the Common Era, this nation was almost completely forced into exile, where it remained for two thousand years before a portion began to return to the ancient homeland.
To be sure, this nation—our nation—had beliefs and practices that today we would call “religious.” Our sacred texts describe how our nation defined itself as having a covenant with the deity that we refer to today as Hashem. The Hebrew prophets later made the audacious claim that Hashem was in fact a universal God who created the world and continues to be concerned about its affairs. That idea, which was not part of ancient Hebrew religion for hundreds of years, became part of Hebrew thought only after we were exiled from the Land of Israel for the first time. But being Jewish has never been defined as being a matter of believing in that God; it has always been a national or civilizational identity that, like any national identity, is based on shared history, shared memories, shared customs, and a sense of shared destiny. Of course, that history and those memories include many that recall encounters with the Divine and the ethical codes that flowed from those encounters. Those religious ideas and experiences are very much a part of what makes us Jewish, but they are by no means what define us as Jews.
Christianity is a good example of what we mean when we describe a “religion.” By definition, it is creedal in nature. A Christian is someone who believes in the theological doctrines of Christianity. People might join churches or celebrate Christmas without necessarily believing in the bodily resurrection or other Christian dogmas, but they still define themselves in relation to religious theology. The idea that Jews must believe in a certain theology is not found anywhere in the Tanach or the Talmud or any other of our foundational texts. Contrary to conventional wisdom, even the Ten Commandments do not include a commandment requiring that Jews “believe in God.”
The idea that Jews must have a certain belief in God did not begin to enter into the Jewish world until Maimonides formulated his Thirteen Principles of Faith in the 12th Century. This idea was heavily influenced by Christianity and Islam—two dogmatic religions followed by most of the people among whom Jews found themselves living—but to my mind it has never accurately described how Jews actually conceive of themselves, how they actually act, and what they actually believe. When we look at those factors, we readily see that being Jewish is a national identity that does not depend on any particular form of religious belief.
While I do not believe that from an empirical standpoint, any Jewish “denomination” is any more “authentic” than another, I also believe that one can make objective statements about whether one form of identity is more likely to promote Jewish continuity and the transmission of a Jewish identity to the next generation. At least in America, the Orthodox movement has been more successful in that regard. But that does not make it more “authentic.”
I believe that Jewish continuity is important and, indeed, a moral imperative. So perhaps, after arguing at length that religious belief is not what makes us Jewish, I should now talk about my experiences and my beliefs. All four of my grandparents were born in Eastern Europe and came to America as children or teenagers with their families around the turn of the 20th Century. One grandmother’s family came to America on the Galveston Plan and settled on a farm in Franklin County, Missouri; two other grandparents settled in St. Louis. One grandfather grew up in New York and married my grandmother after he came here for a visit in the 1920s.
All of my grandparents and the rest of my extended family had grade school educations and worked at blue collar jobs: garment factories, driving a Famous Barr delivery truck, working at the old Chevy plan in North St. Louis, driving a taxi, and so on. It was a time, as I like to say, when Jews had real jobs. That world was in its twilight when I was young, although I vividly remember riding streetcars and seeing the men walking to shul in north St. Louis or in U. City on Friday afternoon as the sun was setting. That world—of “shayne Yidn,” Jewish factory workers, Yiddish speakers, neighborhood kosher butchers and bakers, and little shtiebels—is to me as beautiful, and as irretrievably lost, as the Jewish world of Eastern Europe that was destroyed in the Holocaust.
These men and women had a strong sense that they were part of the Jewish people. Attending a synagogue was one of the ways they expressed their Jewish identity. But the connection with the Jewish people was their paramount concern. Every generation has a project that history and circumstance create for it. My grandparents’ generation was given the task of creating a Jewish life in America and supporting the Zionist idea of the Jewish people’s return to the Land of Israel. My parents’ generation was given many formidable tasks: maintaining Jewish life in an America that was moving from cities to suburbs, overcoming the Depression and winning World War II, establishing a Jewish state, and far and away the most consequential task: rebuilding Jewish faith, identity, and continuity after the Holocaust destroyed a third of the Jewish people and the Jewish civilization of Eastern Europe.
These were the people who made the most impression on my sense of Jewish identity. Like everyone else, I have forged my own identity and my own beliefs, some of which differ from those of my ancestors, but I am always aware of what connects me to this lost world that continues to inspire me as I go about what I consider my generation’s project, which is to enrich our lives with the beauty and meaning of Jewish tradition, and continue to ensure Jewish continuity for the next generation.
With this background in mind, I’ll say a few words about my personal beliefs. I had what I consider a conventional mid-20th Century Jewish education, attending Hebrew School and getting Bar Mitzvahed at Traditional Congregation. It was important to me that my children feel that they are part of the Jewish people, and they attended Epstein before going to Ladue High School.
I think traditional rituals are meaningful and important. They connect us to our past and help us transmit values to the next generation. I think questions such as whether the Torah is literally true or whether God spoke to Moses at Mt. Sinai are essentially unanswerable. For that matter, these questions need not be answered in order for our traditions to be meaningful and true.
No one ever left a performance of “Hamlet” saying that they had just wasted two hours because none of what was depicted on stage had actually happened. Religious rituals and for that matter the stories we tell as part of our tradition similarly convey truths that enrich our lives and help us understand the most basic questions of human existence: why are we here, how should we live, how do we understand the deep mystery of human consciousness, how can we begin to comprehend the age and vastness of the universe, and what is our ultimate destiny? I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, but there is nothing more human than telling stories that explain these questions. Indeed, anthropologists and others who study human biology and evolution believe that the ability to tell stories is what distinguishes us as a species and is what has made us who we are today.
The stories we have been telling as Jews have been some of the most consequential stories that have ever been told in human history. I conceive of myself as someone who plays some small part in trying to understand these stories, discuss their meaning with others, and help transmit them to the next generation.
My educational background is in comparative literature and I try to pay close attention to what our texts actually say. In the Hebrew Bible, God speaks a lot in the early books, but in the later books, there are no quotations from God over hundreds of pages. But in the last book, Job, God again speaks, when he appears to answer Job’s question about why God allows the righteous to suffer. These are the last words God ever speaks in the Tanach, and what God essentially says is, I don’t owe you an answer to that question and you are not going to get one. To me, this eloquently reflects that some questions are unanswerable and it is our lot as human beings to accept that. If I had to summarize a personal theology, it would be this: Bad things happen and no one knows why, but good things also happen and we shouldn’t take them for granted.