USCJ Review - Spring 2004
Finding Strength in a Challenging World
(The following are excerpts from a speech delivered at the 2003 USCJ Biennial Convention in Dallas, Texas.)
We have lived through a very difficult series of years. I would like to address contemporary challenges and then look to Judaism to see what comfort and strength we can derive.
First, we Jews, like most moderns, are challenged by the rampant consumerism that is threatening to absorb and dissolve all moral values in today’s world. Ultimately, we, as human beings, have two very simple choices: We can either approach the world as consumers, asking ourselves, “What’s in this for me?” or we can approach our relationships in a spirit of service, asking instead “What do I have to give?” or “How can I be of help?”
The consumerism that has generated the economic miracle and the high material standard of living that we rightfully celebrate has, at the same time, produced spiritual barrenness; everything is reduced to a commodity. Consumerism extends even to the way people conduct their religious lives. During the High Holy Day period, hundreds of thousands of American Jews engage in what they brazenly call “shul shopping,” in which the choice of what religious community to join is treated no differently than the question of what shoes to purchase or what car to drive.
No surprise, then, that we have reduced human beings to mere objects. We evaluate people for their potential worth and by “worth” we mean their ability to perform economically, to rise to social prominence, to impose themselves on our attention. Some people, by that calculus, matter more, and some matter less, but all of us are cheapened as a result.
To publicly espouse religious virtues and religious values is to mark one as hopelessly benighted and backward in some circles, and public displays of religiosity are termed “dangerous” in many circles. Because of the animosity toward faith, public discussions seldom reflect the deep aspirations and hopes of our best possibilities, instead reducing themselves to cost-benefit analyses. Even within Jewish circles, this mistrust of public religiosity constricts our vision. I spoke recently to a group of influential Jews who displayed to me their horror at our continuing insistence on using Hebrew in our prayers. I asked them, “When you attend an opera, do you criticize Verdi for being performed in Italian? Why is it that it is only when it comes to the classical heritage of Torah, siddur, and Talmud that our expectation is not that we should grow in learning, but that we should dilute the tradition?” If we approach encounters as consumers, it is certainly our right to expect to have to make no effort to grow into our religion.
The second great threat is radical autonomy, the mistaken notion that each individual can have an identity separate from the people around us, and that it is therefore possible and meaningful to be able to make decisions about our own self interest separate from the well-being of the people we love. We live in a culture that encourages that kind of delusion, which encourages people to think only of themselves. Pursuing personal self-interest, we are surprised to discover that radically autonomous people can feel radically isolated, lonely, and unable to connect. This isolation is so chronic that many people cry out for ways to reach each other and often turn to false satisfactions, such as chat rooms, and then are surprised when their loneliness persists.
The third threat that flattens our humanity is the ever-growing indifference that afflicts our culture. I live in a major urban center, and to live in a city means that when you choose to go out to dinner, you literally step over starving people to enter your restaurant. In order to survive, we train ourselves not to see what has become – in our eyes – human trash. We treat these people as unworthy. We harden our hearts so that we don’t see children starving in Africa; so that we don’t feel the pain of the victims of terror in Israel; so that we don’t have to deal with the humanity of other human beings.
At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, the solution that I would propose to the callous indifference of modern culture, to the rampant materialism that deadens our souls and threatens our minds, to the flattening secularism that would strip us of holy days and the cycles of times celebrating the sacred, is nothing less than a reaffirmation of the traditional convictions of Judaism.
The first of these affirmations is God. In life, we face a simple choice. We can live as though our lives are mere happenstance, and there is some evidence to support that cynical and hopeless view. Our tradition has affirmed, however, that we are nothing less than an eruption of the Divine in the world, and that we have been summoned into being by a living and good Creator Who blesses us with the gifts of consciousness, life, and connection. When we look to the stars, we see the miracle of an ordered cosmos; one that was, as it were, designed for human habitation. The cornerstone of our understanding is that the Holy One is the fundamental reality calling to us, beckoning to us, guiding us. We affirm that God, in a spontaneous and unnecessary outpouring of love, created all that exists.
The second affirmation on which we stand is that the world is not simply meaningless and coincidental but is a purposeful creation. We affirm that, in creating the world, God gives us a role to play in its continuous unfolding. We understand creation to be not something that happened in the past but to be a dynamic and continuing process, an evolution of life, a symphony of difference of which we are to be the stewards, the conscience, and the caretakers.
Third, we affirm that God’s love is manifest for us not only in the natural world around us, not only in the starry skies above us, but also in the gift of Torah. We know God to be the energy that creates through the words of the Torah, that the Torah is the place where God and Israel meet. We, too, are active partners in the creation of Torah, and it is for that reason that we turn to Torah to again encounter God.
We Conservative Jews turn to Torah not out of antiquarian interest but as a place to have a serious and nuanced encounter with the generations that have listened for God in Torah in the ages past. My teacher, Rabbi Simon Greenberg, taught me to define Judaism as the Jewish people’s application of Torah to life. The translation of Torah from book to life is the task of every generation of Jews, implying that we are bound to the Torah and bound by the Torah.
Maimonides points out that the mitzvot served three purposes. The first is inner peace. Many of the mitzvot are designed to create a quiet corner in your soul where you can contemplate and know yourself, and through that knowledge come to know the One who called you into being. The second purpose is social order, reminding us, for example, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and to shelter the homeless. The third purpose is to procure for us olam haba, the coming world. I understand this reference in two ways: Olam haba is the world that comes after we are no longer living in this world, but it is also the taste of eternity whenever we are able to create access to it. When we light Shabbat candles, we live for that moment in olam haba in this world.
Our fourth affirmation holds that God’s love (through Torah and mitzvot) is given not to the rabbis, not to the cantors, not tothe educators, and not to the synagogue administrators. God gave the Torah to the entire Jewish people – men, women, and children. Am Yisrael is not simply a fact but a locus of holiness. We, as Conservative Jews, must celebrate and affirm the life of Jewish communities everywhere that Jews live. We must remain open to affirmations of Jewish life from all segments of the Jewish world, and most supremely of all in this age of assault, we must stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel. We treat Israel as a fact, when indeed Israel is an eruption of the Divine into the world. Let it be stated here and now that we will not be separated from our love for Zion and our solidarity with Israel.
Finally, Judaism has always held that we are visitors here; that our true reality is spiritual, and that we are sent into material creation to care for it, to nurture it, to learn from it, and then to bring those lessons home. We are meant to be here as sh’lihim (messengers) for God, advocates for God’s vision. Our task is to live in this world and this life from the perspective of the Divine, knowing that our story does not end with our mortality; that there is a life beyond in which we will live truly and eternally in the mind of the One Who made us.
Integration, perfection and holiness: These are the tools that Judaism, traditionally understood, has brought to a world desperately in need of healing. In a world that would seek to obliterate the Divine image in human beings, Judaism has affirmed that God has fashioned all human beings as images of the Divine. In a world that would seek to worship wealth, and power, and pomp, Torah has reminded us of the quiet and abiding beauty of holiness. And in a world that seeks to value conquest and might, Judaism hallows the small and private sacred deeds of lovingkindness and of justice. Let us then recommit ourselves as traditional Jews, as Conservative Jews, to the life of the mind, and the heart, and the soul, in the service of God through Torah, so that we, like those who have gone before us, can bring God’s light into the world and make of this world a place worthy of our children’s presence.
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson is the Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the Unversity of Judaism, where he serves as vice-president. He is the author of a weekly e-mail Torah commentary, “Today’s Torah,” available at no charge through bartson@uj.edu.
