Doing and Believing
Miriam: (to her parents) If you didn't believe it, why did you bring us up this way? It may have been fun for you, but why impose it on me? Saul: We never taught you that you were supposed to...
...Do I know what form that took...
...Judah: My secretary, who is Catholic, once said to me, "You know, Mr...
...Miriam: Maybe I'm young or naive, but I think the adults have been too apologetic...
...Now it's true that sometimes, because of halachah, we have to build a fence around ourselves in order to prevent a falling away...
...Still, I'm very self-conscious as a Jew, and I like that...
...How do you feel about me...
...M: What I heard you say in response to the earlier question is that you recognize and appreciate other forms of commitment to Judaism, but you think that they are likely to be ineffective...
...If I were to start judging, and deciding that such and such a person isn't kosher enough, I might drive him out of kashrut entirely...
...When the phone rings on Saturday, you have to think "Should I pick it up or shouldn't I," "Is this a life-involving call that I should answer...
...I can't really talk about belief...
...And when I look at our Orthodox community in Brookline, I see that we haven't yet lost one person...
...So we have to try to bridge it, beginning with a basic respect for each other as human beings...
...I don't even think about you...
...I think that Orthodox Judaism is the best means of preserving the next generation, as well as of promoting good...
...Burt: But that is where the struc ture comes in...
...I love the experience, I love the children, and yet I have to answer for my religious outlook...
...How do you transmit historical continuity...
...Mike: We are trying to blend the best part of the Jewish world and the best part of Western society...
...It keeps modern Orthodoxy closer to the line...
...You are reminded of it who knows how many times each day...
...It never occurred to me to ask myself whether I believed in what I was doing...
...Burt: So that brings us right back to the question of how you decide where to draw the line...
...We have given them the chance to grow up in a particular life-style...
...Nor do I like it when people say to me, "Oh, you're kosher," as if I had a disease...
...I am not the one to say what is THE way...
...Am I going to be a fundamentalist, and believe that each letter matters...
...And we spent some pretty sleepless nights discussing where we were coming from and where we were going, what we wanted to do with our children and with ourselves...
...What seems monolithic when you're standing outside of it has as much uncertainty as anything else when you've come up close...
...And a great deal of it is the result of a long, heavy, hard intellectual battle, which I fought mostly when I was in my twenties...
...Faye: That's something people often ignore...
...That is simple courtesy and common respect...
...Rochelle: It takes unacceptable pride to say, "With me the chain is over, with me it ends, because I'm going to intermarry, or I'm going to drop out of Orthodoxy...
...I had no idea that there were other ways of being Jewish, that there was a Jewish life outside of Borough Park...
...M: But one person's basic outfit is another person's decoration, isn't it...
...I feel that I believe, and if you believe then you think that what you are doing is right...
...I've got it made...
...The ultra-Orthodox see us as violating the law, and we ourselves are aware that our decisions regarding the drawing of the line may determine whether our children stay with us or not...
...It's not just about dawening in the morning and getting it over with...
...Rochelle: I try to follow the halachic line...
...So my decision was to be a part of that chain...
...Judah: I'd like to go back to the earlier discussion abo\it how we feel towards the non-observant Jew...
...Even though most Orthodox Jews spend almost all of their social time with other Orthodox Jews, their professional lives are spent in very mixed settings...
...And I think she hit something there...
...I haven't worked it out how after a couple of thousand years people can just announce that suddenly there's a new strain, a new version...
...I hate to be mean, but when I stop and think about it, I say you must have a hell of a problem...
...I don't know what's going to happen when Faye goes to Princeton or when Miriam goes to whatever school she'll go to...
...Maybe it's just curiosity, but I feel that they are looking for horns when they look at me...
...M: So once again we're back to the question...
...Doesn't it all become merely a matter of taste, opinion and convenience—a long cry from commandment...
...You feel yourself to be part of the chain, but you're making personal decisions about what matters and what doesn't...
...We don't talk about belief...
...I teach at a Reform temple, and I feel as though I'm on trial there...
...You also have to be able to ask him into your dining room, to offer him something to eat...
...I wanted my parents to be Jewish and my kids to be Jewish but where did I belong...
...And when we started talking about it and thinking about it, the most important thing was continuity...
...If we don't feel that what we are doing is right, then Orthodoxy is meaningless...
...And the children seem happy and well-adjusted...
...We taught you what to do...
...Does Rabbi Soloveitchik...
...The key.to all of Jewish life is that every individual makes his own commitment in the way that he feels is most satisfying to him...
...I don't want to sit in judgment on anyone...
...It's not really a question of belief...
...Mike: No, we need the right wing...
...How do you do that...
...The halachah is the basic outfit, the dress and the shoes...
...People just call up and say, "I'm here for a week, make my bed...
...And if it is the best way, it is the only way...
...And the responsibility is to keep the chain going...
...People sometimes don't understand that...
...What does it mean to say "modeh," to be grateful...
...Take Torah miSinai, Revelation...
...Then everything else falls into place...
...And the answer to the why is that what we have is the truth...
...Yudi and I really had to sit down and make a decision as to whether or not we wanted this hassle, and that meant that we had to ask ourselves what we believe...
...They say...
...But I think I've done as much as I can to have them go into the mold...
...The real question for us is whether Judaism can survive in the diaspora without Orthodoxy, without observance...
...Now, with that privilege goes a responsibility...
...Saul: I wish you luck, but I think your chances are slim...
...we live...
...And yes, a great deal of it does have to do with comfort and convenience...
...I think there was a huge discrepancy among the sages throughout the centuries...
...I've found that if I do away with some of the structural aspects of religion I lose touch completely with what religion has to say to me...
...The question is how you feel about Jews like me...
...The gap has narrowed, but it's still there...
...Did Maimonides...
...Carol: I work in the total community, with all its elements...
...And a lack of dialogue...
...Maybe I don't look down my nose at people who aren't observant, but once I've come to the decision that what I'm doing is right, then it follows that the people who don't do it are wrong...
...And commitment means covenant and commandment...
...M: I transmit to my children...
...People here have a strong sense of reaching out to the community at large...
...Religious life is founded on action, even if one cannot always fathom the purpose of the action...
...Every family here always has a full house on Shabbos...
...Faye: Besides, until a hundred years ago or so, Judaism was halachic Judaism...
...And I don't consider the non-Orthodox ignorant, nor do I want them to consider me haughty...
...M: Let's put that question into a different form...
...Still, I think that the more comfortable you are with what you have chosen to do, the more apt you are to relate to anyone who wants to identify himself as a Jew...
...Not one kid has rebelled or opted out...
...Rochelle: I hope that's not the last word...
...But without such acts, you never have that feeling...
...Yes to keeping the Shabbos, no to wearing a sheitel...
...That's how things get transmitted...
...Halachically, we're no place...
...I'm not even sure that Conservative Judaism has demonstrated its capacity to survive and to insure Jewish continuity...
...I've talked to my children about our being links in a chain on many occasions...
...M: It appears, then, to be a question of normative Judaism...
...It wasn't an easy decision...
...Mike: Orthodox Jews do things...
...Why...
...And because of that, one feels there are barriers...
...How do you decide...
...M: I don't want to be on trial here...
...We, the people sitting here, and our children, are the last generation of Galut—of Exile...
...It is the best way...
...A great deal of it is trying to be as consistent as possible for my children, and as open as possible about my failings...
...It's better than it used to be, but they still don't understand our world and our ways...
...I've argued that if you ask someone to come to your home, you don't only invite him to the living room...
...How do you decide...
...Something that hasn't been given to any other generation, something for which Jews have prayed for centuries, was given to our generation...
...That's true for me...
...And the fact is that we have done the same thing with our own children...
...But I think Jewishly all day long...
...It tells us when to do, where to do, how to do, and so forth...
...Surri: I don't like all these judgmerits about other people...
...Every time an Orthodox Jew does do something, he is forced to think in religious terms...
...Do you...
...Miriam: No...
...Miriam: But you must have taught us something about God when we were little...
...For many years, the Orthodox community was excluded from the Federation world, because their affairs were not kosher...
...The intercourse of ideas does lead to degeneration...
...Carol: I come at this from a somewhat different perspective, because everyone here grew up as part of an Orthodox milieu, but I didn't...
...One can't be an active, practicing Jew if what one practices is something other than traditional Judaism...
...And what I do is what feels right for me...
...Saul: My father was a hardbitten misnaged, and he once told me a wonderful story about the Hassidic rebbe who could never dawen...
...How do you synthesize...
...Is it an intellectual decision, or is it based on convenience...
...I don't go around checking tsitsis, and if a person tells me he is Orthodox and his home is kosher, I believe that and accept it...
...In the course of answering the when, where and how, you gradually absorb the why...
...Now, if you want to ask why we should want to keep going, that's a different question...
...Mike: Fine, then if they continue to transmit to their children, the continuity is protected...
...That's what happens when you put belief before practice...
...Do you think you are, in some sense, better than Reform Jews, and, if you do, that Agudah Orthodoxy is better than your version of Orthodoxy...
...I envy your Shabbos...
...So I think that mine is the one right way...
...That is, there are many questions you can ask yourself before you do anything, and for us, the halachic framework tells us many of the answers...
...Then, once you've got that, you can decide for yourself what other decorations you want...
...Observance is what keeps us together and keeps us going...
...I'm sorry to say that, but if it is right to fulfill the mitzvot it's wrong not to...
...They watch every move I make...
...But now my answer is that I believe in the halachic process—with reservations...
...And there is just no evidence that it can...
...They tend to think we are pedantic and stuffy, but when I look around this room, every family here has at one time or another had a boarder, a kid from the local day school who couldn't attend unless he lived nearby...
...I realize that I am just window dressing for the Federation, and I realized before I accepted my position that I was going to represent all of Orthodoxy to the women I'd be working with...
...But I have to admit that we do want to isolate and insulate ourselves...
...It's neurotic, but I like it...
...They may or may not continue in this way...
...Almost every time I violate the Shabbos, I ask myself whether I am doing the right thing, whether I should be doing it, what effect it will have on the general condition of religion...
...People really take their Judaism seriously...
...Mike: That's the point...
...My belief really derives from an historical analysis of Jewish survival...
...Of course, there's a problem: If I believe in the halachic process, what am I doing here barelegged and with my head uncovered...
...Could I really tell my children to light the Shabbos candles because their grandmother had done it...
...Now that I think of it, it's hard to imagine that we've never really talked about belief, but we haven't...
...I've been through this in my own life...
...Because when he got up in the morning and started with the ModehAni L'fanecha he would get bogged down on each word...
...And it is the coming close, the creation of dialogue, that maintains the questioning process...
...Stone, I go to Mass every Sunday, and that's when I think about being Catholic, but you are Jewish all day long...
...If you start with the why, you'll never do anything, you'll never get anywhere...
...Shanni: The question of how we perceive each other goes both ways...
...Shanni: When I was growing up, I didn't know there was any other kind of life...
...But what's really been interesting to me is how many women who have said to me, "If I had it to do over, I'd do it your way...
...I happen to work in a Catholic hospital...
...Rochelle: A great deal of it is tradition...
...it involves changing your whole life-style...
...I don't make judgments about the relative tightness of my way compared to someone else's way...
...And I think what you are asking is why, if I believe, do I need all the external structure of Orthodox Judaism...
...And somewhere, in answering that question, God comes into the picture...
...You can't deny the facts: Judaism survives on maximalism...
...But I don't think that being Jewish is less important to us than it is to any of you, and when we talk about it, we use the same words...
...When I was in my twenties, I used to talk about these things...
...When you choose a box of cookies, you read the label...
...it's absurd to do it the other way around...
...I feel comfortable with it...
...Saul: We never taught you that you were supposed to believe this or that...
...Is it the case that "more" is always "better...
...Basically, I feel a camaraderie with him, since I come from the same background, but I also feel badly, because he is missing so much...
...We all synthesize...
...Maybe He has some purpose in mind for us...
...If that ever happened, it happened when I started studying philosophy and ethics...
...And I really feel this in a religious sense...
...Burt: Sure, there are Orthodox groups that look down on us...
...What gives me the right to be the kind of "relaxed" Orthodox person I am...
...Especially about the kids, about how to raise your children...
...M: To a non-Orthodox Jew, it sometimes seems that Orthodox Jews know things—or think they know things—the rest of us don't know...
...Rochelle: I'm not a philosopher, I'm a pragmatist...
...is the very last question to be asked...
...in our own way, we think of ourselves as observant...
...That creates real difficulties for me...
...That doesn't mean that every time you perform a religious act you really bring home the feeling of religion...
...And we want simply to give them the best background we can so that they can face up to it...
...I do think a lot about this, because I am in the world...
...How do you perceive me...
...And what I've come up with by way of an answer is that by structuring your life, you may, on occasion, derive some of the real meaning that religion has...
...I think they are wrong, that they are out of touch with modernity...
...How many of the original Reform families have survived as Jews...
...I had to ask myself what my responsibility is...
...I've tried to close that gap...
...Mike: The point is that you still have your parents and grandparents to fall back on, to transmit to you...
...My own family is Reform...
...And so we tend not to associate or to identify ourselves with others, and there are even laws that proscribe such association...
...My father once said about the ultra-Orthodox, "They can say whatever they want, but in Vilna or in Lodz, none of them would have been considered Orthodox...
...We want to perpetuate this thing, and you can't perpetuate it if you actively associate with people who are uncommitted...
...And what about "ani," I? And so forth, and by the time he was finished with his thinking it was too late to dawen...
...Mike: That's the point...
...And the way I cope with all of that is to practice Judaism to the very best of my ability, which obviously means that I fail in any number of ways...
...First you have to come to the why...
...I've spent a great deal of time thinking about it...
...And we are doing that with our children growing up in the outside world, exposed to all the dangers and the attractions and the temptations...
...M: But commitment and covenant mean different things to different Orthodox people...
...Whatever action you take in life, you take with your religion in mind...
...M: If all that is so, how come the enormous gap between the Orthodox community and the rest of the community...
...Who will transmit to your children...
...Burt: I come from a house where questions were never asked, where it was taken for granted that I would follow a traditional way of life...
...Is that a fair summary...
...I answer my phone on Shabbos, and I work on Shabbos...
...Burt: Still, you're drawing lines...
...Rochelle: I don't feel about you...
...So that's why we stay committed...
Vol. 3 • September 1978 • No. 9
