Four Basic Religious Issues That Divide Us
GILLMAX, NEIL
4 Basic Religious Issues That Divide Us NEIL GILLMAN rhe increasingly raucous debate among the various factions that make up the American Jewish religious community involves four basic issues. The...
...Judaism has never insisted on precise formulations of its beliefs...
...the liberal understands that claim as metaphorical or symbolic...
...The process is inherently indeterminate and to some extent subjective...
...Traditionalists understand revelation in essentially one of two ways—what we may call "hard" traditionalism and "soft" traditionalism...
...Humans are assigned a passive, receiving, recording role...
...The liberal will emphatically deny that God literally "spoke...
...This seminal paper appeared in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973...
...If the law were absolutely clear, the issue would never be raised in the first place...
...In short, we don't know what the Torah demands...
...The liberal, on the other hand, welcomes it, even to the point of considering whether to abrogate an explicit law that has become anachronistic or offensive...
...For when chaos takes over, human beings have lost their point of orientation in the world...
...The liberal may even take the liberty of legislating anew...
...Religion, however, is much more than theology, halacha, liturgy, the synagogue, the rabbinate, and so on...
...Read the first chapters of Genesis...
...Thus, for example, if your congregants live far from the synagogue, allow them to drive to the synagogue on Shabbat so that they will have some experience of Shabbat worship...
...God said no...
...The Jew is expected to obey Torah in its entirety...
...tomorrow, homosexuals...
...What else have we been talking about if not religion...
...And it is this issue that exposes the unresolvable dimensions of the debate...
...Contemporary traditionalists claim that the contents of the written Torah (or at least the Pentateuch) and of the parallel and complementary oral Torah (the Talmud) represent the explicit will of God for the Jewish community...
...The traditionalist will insist that congregants live close to the synagogue, whether or not they in fact do...
...For the traditionalist of whatever hue, Israel's revelation was a sui generis experience...
...What emerges, concludes the liberal, is very much affected by human, and hence, cultural considerations...
...Both the traditionalist and the liberal look at the text of the Torah as sacred arid authoritative, but the traditionalist ascribes the source of its authority to God, while the liberal ascribes its authority to the community, for it is the community that has determined—and implicitly continues to determine—what is properly the content of the Torah...
...We like to think that the practice of our religion is determined by our theology...
...The contemporary liberal, by contrast, insists that whatever God's role may be in initiating revelation, the Torah that has come down to us is as much a human creation as it is divine...
...Modify the demands, acknowledge that some of them may be open to reinterpretation, and you have a chance to win some respect for the system as a whole...
...In no case, however, should the ideal be attenuated or compromised...
...This is essentially the existentialist reading of revelation of the early 20th century German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig...
...For if one structure is threatened, they are all threatened, and then the chaos is no longer merely incipient, but real and overwhelming ("Today we accept women into the rabbinate...
...The two polar positions on this, as on the other three issues, may be characterized, for want of better terms, as traditionalist and liberal...
...Liberals are more prepared to tolerate a measure of displacement, especially if they feel that a particular structure has become morally offensive or simply anachronistic...
...The traditionalist is somewhat embarrassed by this subjectivity and seeks to minimize it...
...The liberal views them as elaborate metaphors devised by the community to capture an inherently elusive or hidden dimension of reality...
...Hence, they are inviolable...
...For both the traditionalist and the liberal, the end product of this process of legal reasoning is by definition open...
...Views of the Cosmos The fourth and final issue that divides the two camps is religion...
...The traditionalist will be appalled at the abrogations and will vigorously resist the liberal's right to legislate anew...
...According to one prominent anthropologist, the ultimate function of religion is to provide a perspective on reality as a whole.* Religion serves to create a sense of "cosmos" in the literal sense of the term, a sense of harmony, wholeness, completeness—the opposite of "chaos," which is confusion, incompleteness, anarchy...
...The liberal Jew regards them as the community's most venerable and distinctive way of seeing the world, but open to revision as the community moves through history...
...These primordial events mark the beginning of history as the Jewish religion understands it...
...Torah stands in opposition to the relativism of contemporary life...
...The "hard" traditionalist insists that when the Torah says that God "spoke" to the children of Israel, that's just what He did...
...Theoloey: Torah The first issue.is theological...
...It conand Its Authority cerns nothing less than the status of Torah and the source of its authority in matters of belief and practice...
...The mechanism for establishing this set of order is halacha, religious law...
...This liberal stance is then translated into a strategy of accommodation...
...Or the liberal may understand God differently from any of the positions described above—for example, as a process or power within the natural order whose revelation takes place through the natural processes of human discovery and creativity...
...The traditionalist knows that in fact, Jews will fall short of that expectation, but the practicing Jew should be aware of falling short and should try to do better next time...
...In fact, the two frequently influence each other...
...Torah is accommodated to the realities of contemporary life...
...Religion creates cosmos out of chaos by structuring our experience of the world...
...that separate one day of the week from the other days...
...But it has clearly emphasized the behavioral implications of that belief system...
...His behavioral obligations were articulated in an expanding series of legal codes...
...The central theme of this history is the tension between cosmos and chaos...
...If the issues are unresolvable, it is not because of lack of good will or understanding, but because we are human beings and our humanness is reflected in everything we do...
...Out of the primordial "unformed and void" [tohu vavohu—Genesis 1:2), the structures of the created world unfold, step by step, at the divine command...
...hence, the question...
...Traditionalist expectations are maximalist...
...The liberal may wish to retain some of these structures—perhaps, for example, the separation of milk and meat— but may reject others—for example, the separation of sexes in the synagogue, which is perceived to have become offensive...
...Religion, you will say...
...The traditionalist regards these structures as established by God's explicit will or word...
...This fourth issue between the traditionalists and the liberals is clearly the most "primitive...
...The authentic Jew was the observant or practicing Jew...
...The liberal can tolerate "soft" (prepositional) revelation, but only if it makes room for the fact that whatever content God may have revealed had to go through the human apparatus of perceiving and comprehending...
...How indeterminate...
...and all the rest, thus creating order out of chaos...
...Another way of putting this is that the traditionalist views these religious structures as objectively real or "true...
...I would love to count women in the minyan, but what can I do...
...They touch upon nothing less than the most elemental layers of our being...
...The process involves legal reasoning—proceeding from the known to the unknown, from precedent to current case...
...Adam and Eve as well as Cain are sent from their original place and condemned to eternal wandering...
...Approaches to Legal Reasoning There is no way of avoiding the radically different weights traditional and liberal Jews assign to the authority of Torah...
...The resurgence of modern Orthodoxy among sophisticated middle and upper middle-class Jews in contemporary America is adduced as evidence of that responsiveness...
...The question is, how subjective...
...In this sense, "hard" traditionalism may be understood as verbal or literal traditionalism...
...That community, according to the liberal, will continue to resist any authoritarian framework...
...Of course, that original sense of cosmos is immediately upset by the two paradigmatic sins—Adam and Eve's rebellion against God (Genesis 3) and Cain's murder of his brother (Genesis 4...
...Everything has its appropriate place and its own day...
...If you insist that they walk, they will simply stay home and go about their normal weekly tasks...
...The soft traditionalist may concede that God's speaking is not to be taken literally—after all, it is somewhat shocking to think of God as actually "speaking"—but the soft traditionalist insists that the beliefs and certainly the practices commanded by the Torah are God's will for the Jewish community...
...Thus the nation Israel becomes kadosh, which, in its original sense, simply meant "separated out" and only derivatively has come to mean "special," "sacred" or "holy...
...Every legal system, not just Judaism's, must devise ways of assessing new, unanticipated situations and determining what constitutes the law in the new situations...
...That is what makes Torah Torah...
...Traditionalists will do everything in their power to defend against that eventuality...
...Strategies for Promoting Commitment to Judaism The third fundamental issue that divides our religious community today relates to the programmatic or pedagogical strategies for accomplishing our goals...
...On the broadest level, these distinctions serve to separate one people from all others, "Israel from the nations" (as we say in the havdalah—literally, the "separating"—liturgy that we recite at the end of the Sabbath...
...The slightest breach in the absolute nature of the demand will undermine its global authority, legitimizing further deviations and resulting in the collapse of the entire system...
...The traditionalist believes that the community will welcome and respond to such an absolutist or maximalist approach as an antidote to the moral and spiritual relativism of modern American life...
...Either way, traditionalism assigns to God the active, formulating role in revelation...
...That process of legal reasoning can take a variety of forms...
...That tension will be resolved only in the messianic age, when the original harmony will be restored...
...For ultimately, the intuitive way in which we structure reality dictates our theology, our view of halachic process and the educational strategies we design to transmit that vision from generation to generation...
...That is why Torah so accurately reflects the age and the milieu in which it emerged...
...The liberal's counterargument claims that modernity is here to stay, that radical individualism, pluralism, the critical temper and the humanist impulse will continue to shape the value system of the contemporary community...
...The only effective strategy for winning commitment, then, is to embrace modernity and its value system, to co-opt it for Jewish educational purposes...
...The dispute between the traditionalists and the liberals, then, may seem to be about a legal issue—may we count women in a minyan for public prayer?—but, in reality, that formulation of the issue masks a far more important and primitive issue: the way in which different segments of the community order their world and their lives, the way they choose to maintain the tenuous hold of cosmos against the perpetual and onrushing threat of chaos...
...Halacha defines the legal distinctions that separate what we may eat from what we may not eat...
...Soft" traditionalism, by contrast, is propositional traditionalism...
...I will concentrate on the polar positions here, though obviously there is a wide spectrum of possibilities in between...
...From the outset, Jewish religious identity was concretized in behavior—in doing certain things and in not doing others...
...But they disagree on how to do this...
...And because of this sense of cosmic order, human beings, who are * Clifford Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System...
...How much accommodation, on what issues and who decides may vary from community to community, but the liberals share a basic agreement that to some extent, the mandates of Torah have to be modified if they are to be taken at all seriously: Demand everything, and you will get nothing...
...one land, city and place on earth from other lands, cities and places...
...created at the climax of the narrative, know where they belong...
...The punishment for these paradigmatic sinners is the same: exile, or literally, "displacement...
...From this perspective, Jewish religion can be viewed as a complex and interlocking set of structures all designed to order the experience of the community so as to ward off chaos...
...The liberal Jew, on the other hand, who thinks of the authority of Torah as rooted in the community, keeps the process as open and flexible as possible, for the liberal sees himself or herself as the contemporary representative of that community whose right and responsibility it has always been to determine what Torah has to say in any concrete situation...
...They too have their place...
...For the traditionalist, to abolish even one of these structures is effectively—on the most primitive human level—to open the gates to chaos, and that is extremely unsettling...
...All of the contenders agree that their goal is to promote the Jewish people's commitment to Jewish religion...
...The stances taken on these four different but related issues divide not only the Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Reform movements, but also the various factions within each of these coalitions...
...the words of the Torah are God's words...
...The liberal, on the other hand, understands revelation as essentially similar to other human experiences...
...But we should derive a good deal of consolation simply from knowing that our divergences are rooted in the intractability of human nature...
...They have literally lost their place, like Adam and Eve, and Cain of old...
...The question, in the end, comes down to how one understands revelation...
...It is the core issue...
...That moment marks the culmination of history, literally, "the end of time...
...The issue turns, in the words of the contemporary philosopher Eugene Boro-witz, on "the respective roles of God and man in revelation...
...This divergence clearly emerges in the second issue that divides the two camps—their contrasting approaches to legal reasoning...
...Alternatively, the liberal may claim that what God revealed was primarily Himself in intimate and covenantal relationship with Israel and that the Torah is Israel's classical response to—rather than record of—that encounter...
...legitimate sexual relations from illegitmate...
...In broad terms, the traditionalist, who assigns explicit divine authority to Torah, imposes relatively strict, narrow parameters on the process of legal reasoning...
...This is the thrust of the claim made by the late Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Chasidic-influenced scholar, that the biblical account of revelation has to be understood as a midrash...
...God imposed the structures on the community...
...Our programmatic and pedagogical strategies often affect the position we take on the more theoretical issues of theology and legal reasoning—which leads to the next issue that divides us...
...This is the naturalist view of revelation of Mordecai Kaplan, the father of Reconstructionism...
...The traditionalist insists that Torah must be presented to the Jewish community as a religious absolute, as an unalterable demand...
Vol. 13 • May 1988 • No. 3
