Michael Gove & History

It is a popular misconception that there is no precise word in the Bible for “history”. But the Bible uses the words “Divrei Hayamim”, which we translate as the two books of Chronicles. That sounds very much to me like what I understand history to be. We have the word for story, “Tolda”, the unfolding of generations, from father to son and mother to daughter. Even if I agree it usually is the narrative of male chauvinists (his story) still there are plenty of contrasting narratives within the whole. If history means objectivity, then of course the Jewish story is a story with an agenda; God’s involvement in the history of a people. In the ancient world one did not record one’s defeats and failures. Remarkably, the Bible did. And we have a tradition of reinterpretation and adaptation, even if it always struggles against conservative interests. I hope this blog often shows how we have changed perspectives, adopted and adapted external ideas, and continued to struggle to adjust our Jewish narrative to changing reality while remaining loyal to our past.

“This is the story of Mankind,” says Genesis (5:1) and the Talmud (Sanhedrin 38b) adds that our forefathers were taught “Dor Dor Ve Dorshav”, “Each generation (has its unique features), its wise men and its leaders.” “Jeptah in his generation was like Samuel in his” (Rosh Hashanah 25b). Human affairs are always fluid. Our tradition requires us to study and know how our story has unfolded, its triumphs and its failures. We recount them all, we preserve them all, and we teach them all. What we add is the extra concept of “Zachor”, remember. We are commanded to remember our past. Memory in itself is not enough unless it is translated into action. That’s what has helped us survive and what makes our attitude to history special.

I was fortunate to have two unconventional but highly inspirational history teachers. So I know that a great teacher is worth so much more than a curriculum. Nevertheless, I have witnessed over the years a significant change in the way history is or is not taught in schools nowadays. Out has gone chronology, looking at great spans of history, and in has come more detailed analyses of sources. This is a tragedy. Not because details are unimportant or that specificity is insignificant. But if one has little understanding of one’s cultural past, it is very difficult to understand one’s present.

I was fortunate to be educated in England at a time when we were expected to understand the unfolding of English life over a thousand years. I was doubly fortunate to have learnt about Jewish history and the occasions when the two narratives conflicted. I could see what the Crusades did for the Normans and how disastrous they were for the Jews. How Jews were expelled from England, and then how vigorously the bishops and aldermen fought against Cromwell’s desire to allow the Jews to reenter. In 1753, Parliament passed the Jew Bill to allow Jews civil rights. George III signed it, and then Lord Newcastle repealed it the next year because of the popular outcry. All of this colored my view of Britain. So when I came to study the Empire it was with a mixture of pride and disdain.

It is so sad that in much of Britain today not only does the curriculum not include the past, glorious and infamous, but now no longer requires students to know anything about the two World Wars. And in the USA many a college education no longer requires certain basic information. I have always made a bird’s eye view of Jewish history an essential feature of any Jewish curriculum I have ever taught.

As each country becomes more multicultural and includes large numbers of citizens from other cultures, I believe it is even more important to teach everyone the history of the host society as well as others. This does not mean ignoring its disasters or excluding other narratives. Certainly one must avoid contempt or intolerance. It should be critical. But one needs a basis, a point of reference, a foundation from which to compare and contrast. If “fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”, then factual information is the beginning of historical knowledge.

In most colleges in the US, the educational system has been serious degraded by kowtowing to cultural relativism. Let alone the dumbing down of standards and curricula. There is nothing wrong with teaching all the various different histories, religions, and cultures around the world. But one needs to start somewhere, and that somewhere is the national narrative, its home.

Britain currently is fortunate to have in Michael Gove, an education secretary who has at last put his foot down and insisted that the school curriculum combines both chronology and a national narrative. In doing so, he has of course stirred up a hornet’s nest. Britain is usually so painfully politically correct. The debate is between those like me, who support chronology and standards, and those who argue that English history is “his story” or just about “posh white blokes”. It may well be. Nevertheless, some “posh white folk” abolished slavery before anyone else did. They supported the idea of a Jewish homeland when no one else did. British history has the good as well as the bad and the ugly.

The mood of appeasement that plagued Britain after the First World War should have taught it certain lessons about relinquishing pride, heritage, and moral backbone. Sadly, the current mood of refusing to recognize and then deal with the imported septic tank of ideology that opposes the culture of the country and seeks to overthrow it, is no different than the challenge that revolutionary Marxism once presented to free societies, which seduced much of the elite of its era.

If one studies chronological history one will recognize those recurring patterns. Otherwise like an ostrich it pretends it is only a few crazies who go round murdering in the name of a cause, it is not serious. Hitler can be negotiated with.

There was and is anti-Semitism, racism, chauvinism, and arrogance in every society. But there is also often a lot of good. It is an error not to study and learn from the past, be it in the UK or the USA. Once upon a time the USA was a beacon of liberality and equality. Over the years it has waxed and waned, delighted and disappointed. I fear it is fallen now to the disease of relativity and no standard at all. Statism rivals Wall Street for self-interest and power. Values give way to interests. Poor H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n must be turning in his grave.

Shavuot - A Kid In Its Mother's Milk

“Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.“ It is a puzzling statement that is repeated three times in the Torah. Twice it is connection with Shavuot, the summer first fruits and harvest festival. The third time is in the context of forbidden foods. Traditionally, these texts have been taken to ban cooking, eating, and benefitting from milk and meat together.

There’s a cute joke: Moses is up on Mount Sinai and the Almighty is conveying the text of the Torah to him. They come to “Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk”, and Moses looks up and says, “By this I assume you mean we should not eat meat and milk dishes at the same time.”

“No,” replies the Almighty, “I simply said, ‘Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.’”

“OK,” says Moses, “So you mean we should have separate dishes for meat and milk."

“No,” says the Master of the Universe, “I simply said, ‘Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.’”

“Fine,” says Moses, “So you mean we should wait six hours after meat before we can eat milk?”

“Alright, Moses,” says the Holy One, “have it your way.”

Maimonides, in his Guide to the Perplexed, hazards a guess that this was an ancient pagan harvest custom that the Israelites were forbidden to imitate. But there was no external support for this theory until 1929, when at a site in Syria called Ras Shamra, that is now known as Ugarit, a French archaeologist uncovered the first of more than a thousand cuneiform tablets from about the 14th century B.C.E.

One of these tablets, experts later claimed, describes a Canaanite religious ritual, part of the worship of their chief god El, which included a command that was deciphered to read, "Cook a kid in milk.” Out of this emerged the claim that the pagans did indeed have a practice of cooking a kid in its mother’s milk. Given the repeated insistence in the Torah of not imitating local pagan worship, this would explain the Biblical Law. Maimonides' intuition seems to have been right. Even the great Biblical scholar Umberto Cassuto of the Hebrew University was taken in. Unfortunately, this theory was based on a mistranslation. The Ugaritic said nothing of the sort. The Ugaritic word gd doesn't mean "kid", and there was no mention of milk nor of cooking.

Perhaps the prohibition was linked to the other Biblical laws requiring humans to treat animals with consideration. Laws included not sacrificing a newly born animal until it has had a week with its mother (Exodus 22, Leviticus 22), taking care of lost animals or helping them when struggling under heavy loads (Exodus 23), not slaughtering a mother and child on the same day (Leviticus 22), sending away the mother bird if you want to take away the eggs or fledglings (Deuteronomy 22), not getting disparate animals to work under the same yoke (Deuteronomy 22), and not muzzling an ox while it threshes (Deuteronomy 25).

Philo of Alexandria suggested a more abstract idea, that "it is unacceptable that the very liquid that sustained the animal at birth should now be used in its death” (De Virtute 13). And this links to the idea of separation. The Israelites were told to separate themselves from the pagans, both morally and behaviorally. The idea of not mixing is found in the laws of Kilayim, sowing different plants together, or crossing plants and animals (Shatnez, wearing wool and flax), holy spaces from communal ones, permitted foods and forbidden foods, permitted unions and forbidden unions, God’s time and human time, meat from blood. It’s a recognition of difference, an awareness of everything that goes on around one in the natural world and the human world. And that’s where babies in their mother’s milk comes in. It is a separation of life from death and an assertion that life is our primary concern on earth. You might also apply this logic to priests and laymen and see the whole structure as a response to pagan priests and practices. And indeed it explains all the Biblical laws that relate to blood of one sort or another. But as the Talmud says, the only Biblical law with an explicit reason, limiting the King in pursuit of sex and money, was contravened by King Solomon precisely because he reasoned he was above it. Anything based on reason alone is risky.

All these attempts at rational explanations are all very well. It’s the sort of sophisticated anthropological symbolism that Mary Douglas writes about so brilliantly in “Leviticus as Literature”. Which, incidentally, is the best commentary on the sacrificial system in Vayikra that I have ever read. But is it relevant? Is all this guesswork anything more than an intellectual exercise? We try to explain the laws of kashrut through medical or utilitarian theories but none of them cover the entire subject. Like them, this seemingly obscure law is part and parcel of the whole system of Jewish lifestyle of modulating all human activity, from sex to food. The way to do that is through law and custom, regardless of origin. In effect, when one considers it this way, the rabbis were right to emphasis the practical, to expand on the poor little kid. Actions speak louder than words.

Why do I keep these laws? It certainly isn’t because of archaeology or complicated associations of ideas. I keep then because they are part of an existing way of life I subscribe to and enjoy, part Divine, part human. They reinforce all sorts of emotions. That is how most thinking religious people relate to their religious traditions. Does the intelligent Christian really believe the myths of the Gospels? Does the reflective Muslim really think that a warring, illiterate Bedouin was given a work of poetic genius in his sleep, or does a Mormon believe that Joseph Smith discovered Golden Tablets? Does an academic Hindu believe the panoply of gods is anything more than symbols and points of reference? And how many of us Jews now literally believe “The sun stood still in the valley of Ayalon”? We delude ourselves into thinking religion is primarily theological orthodoxy. It is concerned with narratives (some like to use the word ‘myth’) and rituals that should lead to correct actions and appropriate thought. This should be the function of ritual of course, not just routine thoughtless behavior.

Does it matter where eating cheesecake on Shavuot came from, or how late the idea of Shavuot being the anniversary of the Sinai Revelation emerged, or whether the Tikkun was an invention of seventeenth century Kabbalists? It is all interesting and worthy of study, of course, but it is not the reason we do it all. That lies deep in our human minds and in our mystical souls, as well as in the very basic physiological need for order, system, and a structure for facing the constant challenges and pressures of life.

Chag Sameach!

Soccer Hooliganism

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted the sad fact that the supporters of London soccer club, Tottenham Hotspur, attract the violent attention of fascist thugs wherever they travel abroad. Soccer is a battleground in Europe and too often an outlet for racism and Judeophobia.

In Britain football clubs were proxies for religious wars. In cities like Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow, the major clubs were traditionally and until recently either Protestant or Catholic. I once experienced a Glasgow Rangers versus Celtic derby sitting between a Catholic priest and a minister of the Church of Scotland. When the Protestants stood to sing the National Anthem, “God save the Queen”, the Catholic half of the stadium booed and cursed. And when the Catholics sang their anthem, “You’ll never walk alone”, the Protestants erupted in vitriol, hurling abuse at the pope. I was kissed on my right check when Rangers scored and on my left when Celtic did. Mercifully, the game ended in a one-one draw.

For some reason, London avoided the religious divide. Most Jews in working-class London tended to support Arsenal, whereas the more genteel middle classes went for Tottenham. Tottenham Chutspa, as we called them, but mostly known as “The Spurs”, was my father’s team. He took me to watch them play several times. I remember fondly, in those days of standing terraces rather than seats, the crowds delighted in shouting out running commentaries and abuse, sarcastic comments that mercilessly lambasted unfortunate errors and made fun of any player off his game. “Hey, Jimmy! Yer shorts are too long. Are you playing for the other side?” It was done in a spirit of good humor that made it an art form that was every bit as entertaining as the match itself, and my father used those same skills to humiliate our school team every time he watched us play! It spurred us on to try harder.

As British society began to fracture and change during the sixties, hooliganism became the norm at soccer matches. Thugs went to fight as much as watch the game. Pitched battles were the norm. Families no longer dared to go. Chants became crude hate-filled rants. Black players were taunted unceasingly. But then a series of tragedies slowly forced the authorities to think deeply about the way the game was going and how to separate warring gangs of rival toughs.

Television poured in huge sums of money. Stars who had earned working-class wages now joined the league of millionaires. Young, barely literate thugs suddenly strutted the social scene, flaunting their wealth in the demimonde world of nightclubs, crooks, and hookers. And of course they fuelled the pathetic cult of celebrity. For the first time, successful Jewish businessmen entered the fray. Soon both Spurs and Arsenal had Jewish owners, and even Chelsea, once regarded as the most anti-Semitic of clubs, found a vaguely Jewish Russian oligarch to pour millions into it.

Nevertheless, Tottenham Hotspur seemed to have more of a Jewish presence than the rest and, slowly, working-class fascist thugs around the country started to chant anti-Semitic invective against Spurs supporters. The Spurs fought back. Even the non-Jewish supporters reveled in calling themselves the “Yiddos”, and they actually adopted the name as a badge of honor. The taunting didn’t work.

In Britain, anti-Semitism was always there amongst the thuggish elements (as well as the elites), but it wasn’t the biggest problem. Racism became the toughest hatred to dislodge. One might have expected the arrival of the large black and Muslim population to lead to violence between them and Jews at soccer matches. This didn’t happen significantly in the UK. The immigrants, both black and Muslim, stayed away in significant numbers (the rising cost of entry tickets didn’t help). They concentrated on sports the British Empire taught them, such as cricket where skill alone enabled the former colonials to regularly humiliate their old Imperial masters.

Just as Spurs was the Jewish club in London, so in Holland was Ajax. Ajax Amsterdam had, in fact, been founded by Jews and was known as a Jewish club long after most Jews had left. Its supporters took to waving Israeli flags and of course this inspired reactions. Similarly in Ireland, Protestant soccer clubs adopted a pro-Israel stance in reaction to Catholic anti-Semitism. Any whiff of an Israeli player or team in Ireland produces a hate fest of anti-Semitism such as, “Send him to the gas chambers!” Somehow, away from Britain anti-Semitism felt freer to flaunt itself. And things have been getting increasingly evil.

There was a time when it was British supporters travelling abroad who instigated the violence. But as Britain toughened up on its own game, the notorious football riots of twenty years year past have receded. Violence, racism, and indeed anti-Israelism still erupt at English soccer matches every now and again, but at least the players and the authorities are responding. Still, soccer players in Britain are not the most cultured or educated example of homo sapiens or even of soccer players. That’s why England rarely wins anything. Whereas Germany, more cerebral as well as tough, do so much better. Perhaps it is because German players tend not to have tattoos, neither do Ronaldo or Messi. Beckham, on the other hand, is covered in them, and he covers his bases by having a cross as well as two Hebrew phrases.

In Europe after the war, it was unfashionable to be anti-Semitic and indeed anti-Israel; this has now changed. We are seeing an increase in attacks on any sign of Jewish or Israeli presence. That is why so many Tottenham supporters travelling abroad in Europe are being attacked and injured.

Just as it is pretty widespread now in the world of classical music to disrupt concerts featuring Israeli performers, so the violence directed at Jews and Israelis in Europe is a sign of a broken moral compass. You can’t blame the game or the music. But you can blame people. Unless the authorities act quickly and forcefully to stop abuse of any sort, the disease will spread.
PS - I was born in Manchester, so I support United!

Boston, Cameras, and Civil Liberties

America is a crazy land of contradictions, and yet if ever there was an argument in favor dysfunction, the USA is it.

Enough of its senators could not agree to require its citizens to be checked before being allowed to buy guns. Or put it another way, this is a democracy where the National Rifle Association can buy enough senators to carry out its wishes. And which normal healthy state could possibly object to limiting the size and arsenals of guns readily available to the ordinary man and woman in the street? No state except for the United States of America. And this regardless of how many mentally unstable mass murderers have already killed so many innocents, how many tragedies have occurred, or that the death from gun-inflicted wounds is so massively higher than anywhere else on earth. As they say, “You cannot be serious.”

OK, so the Right is crazy. What about the Left? A few weeks ago, two brothers set off bombs at the Boston Marathon that killed three and caused some of the most horrific injuries to innocent bystanders it has been my unfortunate lot to see on television (and outside Israel). They were apprehended before they could execute their planned campaign of violence only because security cameras caught them on video. In Boston, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) had successfully blocked the city from placing cameras in the city center public places and had prevented others from being activated because, they argued, it was in breach of civil liberties. Fortunately, private stores had their cameras turned on and it was thanks to those of Lord & Taylor that the terrorists were identified and so quickly. Yet still the ACLU continues to campaign against cameras in public places. They too are either misguided or naïve ideologues. How can we deal with evil, amoral enemies with our hands tied behind our backs? Surely safety overrides libertarian considerations. Indeed according to Hobbes (whom the Founding Fathers admired), this is the very basis of society. We give up freedoms. We accept taxes and limitations precisely as the price for protection and safety. OK, so they don’t agree with Hobbes, but I do! Besides, if you are doing nothing illegal in a public place what have you got to fear? No one has suggested putting cameras in the homes and bedrooms of American citizens (without a court order).

The ACLU mentality is of the same breed as the refusal of so many sections of US society to accept that this kind of violence is indeed a product of Islam. What Islam was intended to be, or was once, is not what huge swathes of it are now. Similarly in Judaism, what was intended and how many practice it or don’t, is a far cry from its ideal past. Are we to pretend all is healthy and rosy in our garden and not admit what is distorted? Should we say that the religious anti-Zionists who demonstrate with our enemies are not really Jews? I might like to, but it won’t help. I thank the Lord they don’t explode bombs. But political correctness prevents dealing with issues and only prolongs the agony.

Western states are irrational and all but ungovernable. They encompass so many radically different ideologies, ethnic and religious groups, so many contrasting ways of life. Somehow they find ways, through trial and error, of coping. They are more popular places to live in those countries which are controlled and commanded, whether by religion or political ‘isms’ which stand in the way of progress and resolution and only delay transformation.

Yet I believe good governance requires a spiritual, ethical dimension. If I had to put my finger on why the USA has been relatively successful, it is precisely because its founding ethical utilitarianism was combined with a spiritual persuasion, even if it was antinomian and separated officially from state.

To return to civil liberties, nothing better illustrates the difference between a Jewish religious standpoint and the values of the ACLU. Once I believed it had a vital role to play, like the unions. But now, like the unions, they have betrayed their mandate, and they stand in the way of progress rather than for it. Its prevailing spirit is to enthrone individuality over all other else. And while I agree with the importance of individuality, it cannot be the overriding principle in a communitarian world.

Our religious culture assumes we do need checks and balances, a restraining principle. This is provided not just by our moral system, but also by the idea that we are always being watched. As the Mishna in Avot says, “Think of three things and you’ll never go wrong; an eye is looking, an ear is hearing and everything is being recorded.” Now they were not thinking of the FBI but they were thinking of God and of course the obvious difference between them is corruption.

In our tradition, having someone look over your shoulder is a good thing. In my Musar Yeshiva (Musar is the ethical religious movement introduced into Lithuanian yeshivot to raise the moral and spiritual level of yeshivah students, started by Rav Israel Salanter 1810-1883), we were all allocated a senior student to keep an eye on us during the day and to tell us in the evening what we had done that was inappropriate or whether there was anything, any characteristic, that could be bettered. We called that moral training. It is no bad thing to imagine that everything is being recorded.

As the Talmudic giant Rebbi Yossi once said, “All my life I have never said anything and then had to turn round to see if anyone was listening.” How many of us can say that! Indeed, how many regret half the comments and photos they allowed to go up on Facebook and now feel embarrassed or ashamed! It would be no bad thing to have a friendly heavenly voice telling us when to watch out. In our tradition we have security cameras. God is watching. We live with it! But for others the mechanical kind is better than nothing.

Margaret Thatcher

The death and magnificent funeral of Margaret Thatcher has reminded us of what a divisive figure she was. My only personal encounter with Margaret Thatcher was when as Minister of Education, she was the guest of honor at the Carmel College graduation ceremony (we called it Speech Day) in 1971. I did not warm to her. She was hectoring and lacking in warmth. I admit I was biased. I should confess that I was brought up in a family that considered voting Conservative a betrayal of one’s intellectual and moral integrity. But that was at a time when Britain was still dominated and hobbled by class. The Conservative party was regarded as the preserve of aristocratic, military, wealthy, male Britons (and their obedient ladies) and it tolerated those aspiring to upward mobility. Most Jews were still closer to the ethic of socialism and the Labour Party (despite the ghastly postwar anti-Semitic Ernest Bevin). It was much more pro-Jewish and had many more Jewish members of Parliament in those days.

Britain was polarized in my youth, far more than anyone can imagine nowadays. Class pervaded everything. In the Oxfordshire countryside where I grew up, the Landed Gentry lived on their own estates and everything and everyone around them was kept at a discreet distance. In the village pubs there were two bars; the public bar for the working classes and the saloon bar for the genteel middle and upper classes. In the local town, Wallingford, there was one general store called “Field and Hawkins” for the upper classes, and a discreet square away was “Petits” for the rest. The wealthy went to private schools (ironically called “public schools”) and the middle and working classes went to state schools. There was an annual cricket game called “Gentlemen v Players”. Gentlemen were upper-class amateurs. The Players were the working-class athletes who were paid to perform. Upper classes went horse racing at Royal Ascot. The poor went greyhound racing. The Upper Classes went to work with a bowler hat and furled umbrella, the workers in cloth caps.

During the sixties everything began to change, however slowly. West Indian immigration, the Beatles and Rolling Stones who appealed across the class divide, all helped. But still, the historic grip of the Royal Family and its aristocracy was preserved. The House of Lords, still dominated by birth rather than either merit or democracy. It could interfere with or block the will of the freely elected House of Commons (don’t the names themselves say it all). Women might have had a vote but they were still regarded as the weaker sex. “A woman was expected to be seen and not heard.”

The Conservative Party was dominated by Peers of the Realm or their relatives. And into this atmosphere swept Margaret Thatcher, ably supported by her wealthy husband. I well remember the extent to which she was despised by her own party for being a woman with a mind of her own, and worse, for being the daughter of a grocer. That was the most damning insult the Tories could throw at her in those days.

Her own party begrudgingly allowed her promotion only because she fought for it, and most of them disliked her for dislodging the weak, anodyne Edward Heath. But she had the strength of character and will, first to fight her ground, then to overcome and finally to hector them into submission. It was only after a long reign that they were they able to turn on her and pay her back.

Inevitably, she was and is despised by the Left and adored by the Right. Her economic record is still a matter of dispute. But there is no doubt she was a catalyst for significant change in many areas. There were inevitably battles she lost or causes she got wrong. But she had guts. She took on the uncompromising coal miner leader Arthur Scargill and broke the back of union resistance. She fought against political correctness and turned Britain into a society where you could get things done and there were opportunities for rising out of dependency if only you were prepared to “get on your bike”, as one of her ministers put it.

It would take another twenty years before the Labour Party broke the vice the unions still had on them. Tony Blair became electable precisely because he followed Thatcher’s pragmatism and surprisingly, his more feminine approach. Even so, neither she nor he could control the abuses and costs of welfare. She was fortunate that North Sea oil sustained her economically.

She is blamed for being unenthusiastic about the European Economic Union. That was because she loathed lazy bureaucracy, incompetence, financial corruption, unnecessary subsidies, and decisions based on not upsetting anyone. Imagine, members of the European Parliament shuttling between two duplicating parliaments, one in Brussels and the other in Strasbourg, just to keep France sweet. She was right. The EU has shown itself administratively and financially to be a mess, even if culturally and as a market for goods it has been a success.

As for the Jews, she understood us better than any other prime minister. Her Finchley constituency was heavily Jewish. Her ideology was closer to Biblical self-sufficiency than Anglican noblesse oblige. That was why she got on so well with Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits. She surrounded herself with more Jewish cabinet ministers than any previous PM, and don’t think she wasn’t hated for it.

In the Old World they don’t like strong leaders who are unafraid to get tough. They prefer consensus. They look for compromise. The result is that they tend to either capitulate or awake too late to stop the inevitable. Thatcher was never afraid to speak her mind, to say it as she saw it. That was why the Americans always admired her more than the Brits.

Whether it is politics or religion, boredom, consensus, bureaucracy and vested interests all place a dead hand on creativity and innovation. The gutsy, radical, innovative thinkers lose out to competent conforming self-servers. Maggie riled her civil servants and loathed her diplomats. The epithet “The Iron Lady” was originally intended as an insult. It became her badge of honor. She was tough. And tough is what we really need if we are ever to get things done. Give me a gutsy leader I disagree with rather than a weak one who will not take a stand.

Not My Bible

I am not amongst those who consider it a religious crime to live outside Israel. After all, since the days of the Babylonian Exile (actually even earlier the Judean kings established an Israelite garrison and temple at Elephantine) large numbers of us have lived beyond our ancestral borders. But I do believe in the idea of Galut, Exile. And by that I mean the profound sense that one is fundamentally at odds with the prevailing culture. And sadly one can often feel a sense of Galut within present day Israel’s borders, where so many seem to want to imitate the very worst aspects of Western pop culture.

But here in America I have recently been feeling it more than ever. Even though for Jews in the Diaspora I cannot think of a better place for us to live in peace and harmony. Although you only need to read “FDR and the Jews” by Richard Breitman and Allen J. Lichtman to realize how vehemently we were hated and excluded even in the USA.

The most popular television show in the US at the moment is the History Channel’s “The Bible”. It is watched more than the trashiest reality shows, the banal talent competitions, and the series about zombies and vampires (all good reason for banning television from any sane household). The History Channel, on the other hand, usually deals in facts rather than fantasies. Not this time.

My issue is not that the part that deals with our Bible is badly researched and full of anomalies and anachronisms. It is when it gets to the New Testament that I realize why anti-Semitism is still so prevalent and persistent all around the world and why I feel so culturally alienated. The current incremental rise of anti-Semitism is mainly driven by Muslim and neo-fascist thugs. But it is the subtle undercurrent of negativity, perpetuated by holy texts that gives a patina of justification for the antipathy.

I am amongst those who think that Pauline and later Christianity developed a series of myths based on earlier popular ideas rather than on a specific, living human being. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, unless it leads to torturing and killing those who do not agree with you. We too have our earlier Canaanite horror stories. Both Christianity and Islam wanted to supersede what came before. To do this they had to show how their religion was so much better. And to hammer it home they had to present the Jews as primitive, hypocritical, corrupt betrayers of truth which the new religion was going to put right. The very distinction between Old Testament and New Testament that make up the Christian Bible is a clear statement that we oldies are now out of date and out of touch.

In the Christian world, for thousands of years Jews have been cursed and pursued for the “crime” of rejecting Jesus and the greater crime of causing his death. In some quarters we are still blamed for “killing God”, ridiculous as such a claim might sound to you and me. As for the myth of Jesus being accused of heresy, you will not find anywhere in Jewish law any hint that it is heresy to say “ I am the King of the Jews,” “I am the Son of God,” or indeed to claim “I am God.” One might think you are a lunatic, but hardly a rational heretic. And if trying to make Judaism more popular and humane were a crime, then the great Hillel who lived a generation before would have been in trouble. So would all the many faith healers who abounded at that time. And If the crime were a political one, like saying I am the President, or King of the Jews, if the Romans had an issue with that, we certainly didn’t. The proof of the pudding would lie in achieving the goal of actually getting appointed and then seeing off the Romans. Otherwise he’d be no greater a threat than Bonnie Prince Charlie. It is possible that factions within the Jewish community supported Roman rule and had an interest in suppressing opposition but then why not just say it is was? The whole narrative is so improbable and unhistorical.

The directors of “The Bible” protested that we were not propagating Jew-hatred by having the Jewish priests accuse Jesus of heresy and handing him over to the Romans. But this series inevitably propagates the “official version” of the emergence of a new, clean, honest religion to replace a corrupt, petty, hypocritical one identified with Jews today. This message is hammered home visually by having the Jews wear a modern immediately identifiable tallit. There are not very subtle messages of Jews as the bad guys, the evil moneychangers in the Temple, reminiscent of Wall Street (who in fact were simply currency exchangers providing a service to pilgrims to cash in their local travelers checks to pay for accommodation at the King David Hotel or a quick sacrifice to atone for whatever). But it is now a cliché to accuse Jews of being moneylenders.

I cannot condemn Christians in what is predominantly a Christian country for propagating their myths. Every few years another similar version hits the big screen or the little one. But can you blame me for feeling a cultural dissonance? There are still plenty of crazy missionaries out there, and others, apparently sane, telling us Jews we will not get to Heaven unless we repent.

Perhaps those who identify with Jesus might secretly think I’m one of the Devil’s Squad? How else can you explain the persistence of that other myth that around 12 million Jews control the billions of others in this planet? It can’t be logic. It must be myth. Who, pray, is responsible for that? Oh yes, they’ll tell you, it is all our fault!

The period of mourning called The Omer that we observe between Pesach and Shavuot is a period of mourning largely because historically after Easter the Crusades began and peasants poured out of churches after incendiary sermons against the Christ-killers, eager to avenge the death of their savior by killing as many local Jews as possible. Thankfully, times have changed. But for too many, the narrative has not.

Israel is still the only place on earth where Jews can feel culturally at home and not be aware of the prevalence of competing theologies and myths. But then, of course, we know Israel has other problems.

Being Jewish Without God

What if you just do not believe in God? Does this mean there is no room for you in the Jewish religion? On the surface, yes, it does. God underpins the Torah. And the Torah is the essential core of Jewish religious life. But the question is what one means by “God”. If one thinks that God is an ancient man sitting up in the clouds casting thunderbolts at sinners and bestowing bounteous rewards on the good, or like Superman, He intervenes whenever bad things look like happening, then I am not sure how many so-called “believers” share such a view. Or what if your God had a physical presence or representation? Many Medieval rabbis thought so and many mystics think that way even now. Would that put you out of the official camp?

Most of us who do make God the core of our religious lives and the object of our spiritual yearning are constantly struggling. We move in and out of periods of profound conviction and then serious doubt. Each one of us creates our own framework of religious engagement in the light of our own mental characteristics. We are not unique in this. Our sacred literature is full of examples of great spiritual forebears who often felt lost, abandoned, and even alienated. They all needed reassurance. Yet they remain the role models of our spiritual heritage.

The Torah actually does not say, “You must believe in God.” The first of the Ten Commandments simply says, “I am the Lord your God.” It’s an invitation to engage, rather than a theological command to attest to something one may not be able to articulate. For all the Divine miracles in the Bible, the people kept on falling back to idolatrous ways and abandoned their God. So why isn’t there room nowadays for an honest doubter?

Many Jews have no interest in religion. Their criteria for Jewishness might be literature or Jews who contributed to the wider world. Their heroes will be people like Freud, Marx, Woody Allen, Saul Bellow, or the host of acclaimed writers of partly Jewish heritage, with a measure of talent and brains but no claims to Jewish spirituality. Their causes will be civil rights. Their festivals will be musical and cinematic. They might possess a feeling of being defined by anti-Semitism or feel a shared historical destiny. But the life they lead will be no different than that of the liberal academically inclined people they mix with. That, of course, is their right, and if they are also ethical, caring human beings, even better.

There are other positions I can feel a kinship to even if I go a stage further. There is the heightened sensitivity to the Divine dimension, to feeling that there is more in this universe than our physical existence. Such sentiments have been articulated by Einstein, or more recently by the late legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin. But neither would accept an idea of God as the creator, the great intervener in human affairs. And of course there are different degrees of commitment within “religious” Judaism itself.

The religious person I identify with (insofar as I identify with anyone) is one whose life revolves around a religious calendar, who spends time every day in spiritual activity, who tries to relate in practice to Torah values. It is not a profession of faith as much as a commitment to behavior and this behavior is not just rote but ethical. I take my lead from the Mishna; Rebbi Yeudah HaNasi says in Avot 2:1, “What is the right path for a man to choose? That which is honorable to him and brings him honor in the eyes of others.” Or as Chaninah Ben Dosa says in Chapter 3:9, “Whoever humans regard as a good person, God considers good too.”

I do not consider a Jew to be religious if his behavior towards other human beings is unethical, regardless of his confessed beliefs. And conversely I do consider someone a good human being if he or she relates positively and kindly to other humans, regardless of religious practice. The two principles of our religion are the relationship between God and Humanity and between humans themselves. If one part of the equation is missing there is an imbalance. But an imbalance is not grounds for dismissal. It is rather an invitation to engage more deeply.

The absence of religious ritual is a mark of how seriously or not a person takes his religious life. The value of ritual, of Jewish behavior, is that it helps stimulate and repeat certain types of spiritual encounters and experiences. If someone believes in the importance of being healthy or fit but never acts on it, the belief becomes vague sentimentality. That is why I am in favor of living a religious life, even if one does not believe in God. The rabbis say, “From doing something for the wrong reason one can come to do it for the right one.” They didn’t set a time limit. Perhaps that person might never be able to jump to the higher level. But they did not reject the honest doubters.

We have always been a “broad church”. Where Talmudic Judaism drew the line was at the person who ideologically, defiantly denied the possibility of God. That was what defined the person who cut himself off from his religious roots, the certainty of “not” as opposed to the uncertainty of possibility. The so-called Wicked Son we read about at the Seder, though even he kept the Seder ritual. When one encounters men like Noam Chomsky or Woody Allen, one sees where the process of religion-less Judaism is leading. I can respect them as humans, even if I do not respect them as Jews. Once, apostasy involved conversion to another religion. Now it is the gentle but certain disappearance from the ranks and from the causes that preserve us.

So here I am, unhappy about religious hypocrisy, worried about those of our family who are leaving us. Why shouldn’t I try to include anyone who manifestly lives a Jewish life, regardless of intellectual reservation? If an agnostic Jew wants to keep Shabbat, I say, “Good for you! Come join my minyan!”