Strengthening Reform 1. Who Needs God?
June 19, 2008
Defining Reform | Israel | Torah
(13 comments)
By William Berkson
As I was writing my second post on Israel and the Jewish community worldwide, the outstanding journalist and real 'mensh' Tim Russert dropped dead. And he was younger than me. That made me think: I'd better start posting first on what I think is most important. So here will start a series of posts laying out a vision of how to strengthen Reform Judaism. I would love your comments on where you think I am going right or wrong with this vision, and what you'd add or change.
So let's start, like the Torah, with God.
Who needs God? This may seem like a strange question within a Reform context, because Reform from the beginning emphasized God and ethics as the center of Judaism. But secular Judaism is the alternative on the 'left' of Reform, and as Reform is on the left of Judaism already, this seems a natural starting point.
I see that in the US there are now more than thirty congregations of Humanistic Judaism--a movement started by a Reform rabbi. The idea of this secular humanist Judaism is that we can have Shabbat and life cycle rituals, ethics and ethical training, and identification with the Jewish people without a belief in a God of any kind. In my experience a significant number of members of Reform congregations say they don't believe in God, so they are attending Reform synagogues for similar reasons. (See editor's note below)
The problem with humanistic Judaism is that human beings are not that great. That's only partly a joke. We know that people are capable of both horrors and heroics. Humanism relies on rationality to direct us in the right way, but reason is a guide, and not a judge. The idea of Reason as a faculty can judge the right thing to do is a debunked relic. Our ability to logically compare ideas and evidence is real, but that faculty of reasoning doesn't make decisions for us. For decisions, we need values, including ethical values.
Humanistic Judaism believes in Jewish ethical values, but has no foundation that inspires us to follow them. And that is the fundamental problem. Without God, Judaism can't inspire.
Let me explain. Ethical values are priorities that transcend "myself and this moment". All ideas of God in Judaism are the same way. They say we are part of something bigger than ourselves, more enduring than the moment, and give value to other people, and to what happens in the future.
According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, many scholars hold that the traditional sacred proper name of God in Judaism, yod-hey-vav-hey, is a 'hifil' or causative tense of an old form of the root for 'to be'. In other words, the basic idea of God in Judaism, as accepted by Moses, is that God is the one, common "cause of being." And in a famous enigmatic phrase "ehyeasherehye" [Ex 3:14) the Torah indicates that God is an ongoing, or eternal cause of being.
Depending on your other ideas about God this concept tells us that we are part of one plan, or are all part of one greater whole, and that whole not only includes our fellow humanity, but also history. Common ties that link us to one another, and the past and the future, are an underlying reality.
This vision of one God gives us a lens to view our actions as part of a common enterprise. The practice of Judaism in our relationships, in our celebrations, and in our study and meditations gives the opportunity to experience the holiness in our world and our lives. And that concrete experience of the sacred can inspire our thoughts, feelings and actions.
Now the question is, can we have a modern sensibility, fully accepting of modern science, and still accept a concept of God that gives us a sense of a Presence in our lives, and feelings of the sacred that inspire us and lift us up?
That issue I will take up in the next post.
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Editor's note: In 1994 the Union for Reform Judaism voted to deny membership to a Humanistic congregation because there is a distinct difference between an individual who does not believe in God and a congregation that eliminates the concept and word from its liturgy and principles. As Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, said upon the death of Rabbi Sherwin Wine, the founder of Humanistic Judaism: It "forced Reform Judaism to figure out what the boundaries of Reform Judaism were." For leaders of Reform Judaism, "that became the boundary. You could not be a Reform Jew and not say Shema Yisroel."
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My reaction in my occasional encounters with Humanistic Jews has been along the lines of Methinks the lady doth protest too much. How, after all, can one teach or preach Jewish values, Jewish history, Jewish sacred literature, without at least teaching about God? If anything, God or His/Her absence, plays a stronger role in Humanistic Judaism than among many Reform congregants, who are willing to say the words whether or not they (we) actually believe them. The prevailing practice in Reform congregations is built on Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
At some level, we can equate the impulse of Humanistic Judaism to the Labor Zionist ethos of the Ben Gurion generation -- a strong commitment to Jewish peoplehood, Jewish culture, and Jewish folkways, divorced from full-scale ritual piety. In speaking a few years ago with a group of largely second-generation Labor Zionists in their fifties, I asked how many of their parents had belonged to synagogues. None. And then I asked how many of them belonged to synagogues. All! Did a God who had been missing from their parents' lives come back into theirs? I think not -- I think that the synagogue had replaced the neighborhood and the club as a place for Jews to be Jewish together, and that the belief in God was just not very important, one way or the other.
As a committed synagogue Jew, I don't much care what people believe, but what they do. There are many ways of "doing Jewish" and they all stem from the God Idea, to use Rabbi Borowitz's phrase, whether or not the do-ers want to profess that as their motive.
Besides, there's no upside to actively denying the existence of God!