This article was brought to my attention today and I feel compelled to give it as much as exposure possible since the writers concerns echo mine as well about the fate of Judaism. I have just returned from a Jewish meditation retreat Shabbat Weekend at the Hannaton Educational Center at the Kibbutz. I will write about my experience at the retreat soon. The experience only confirmed once again the need for serious expansion of the way in which we practice, investigate, question and re-create our understanding of Judaism and its traditions. This is the original link to the Jpost article. Part one and Two By Nathan Lopes Cardozo
Many of us believe that Judaism is thriving.
After all, we have greater religious observance, more Jewish schools, yeshivot, women’s colleges and outreach programs than ever before. The truth, however, is radically different.
Judaism is nearly irrelevant. It suffers from a major malady.
In truth, it is not only Judaism that suffers from this disease but the whole world. We have fallen in love with an endless supply of all-encompassing but passive information, which does not get processed but only recycled.
We no longer produce bold ideas.
They demand too much effort and do not suit our most important need: instant satisfaction. With the exception of science, we only admire bold ideas when we feel our empty pockets, but not when they dare challenge our empty souls. We love the commonplace instead of the visionary.
While in ages past, discussions within our faith could and did ignite the fires of debate, incite revolutions and fundamentally change our views about Judaism and the world – as when the Baal Shem Tov founded Hassidism – we are now confronted with an increasingly post-idea Judaism. Provoking ideas that would stagger our minds are no longer “in.” If anything, they are condemned as heresy.
Most of our yeshivot have retreated from creative thinking. We encourage the narrowest specialization rather than push for daring ideas. We are producing a generation that believes its task is to tend potted plants rather than plant forests. We teach young people what to think instead of teaching them how to think. The onslaught of halachic works, which educate them in the minutiae of the most intricate parts of Jewish law, hardly generates inspiring new ideas about these laws.
AS A result, we are faced with our youth either walking out on Judaism or becoming religious extremists who can’t see the forest for the trees.We fail to realize is that this is the result of our own educational system.
Information is not simply to have but to produce ideas that make sense of the information gathered and move it toward higher latitudes.But Jewish education today is mostly about producing a generation of religious Jews who know more and more about Jewish observance but think less and less about what they know.
This is even truer of their teachers.
Many of them are great Talmudic scholars, but these very scholars do not realize that they have drowned in their vast knowledge. The more they know, the less they understand. Just as a bird may think that it is an act of kindness to lift a fish into the air, so these rabbis think they are providing their students with spiritual oxygen but may actually be choking them.
They are embalming Judaism while claiming it is alive because it continues to maintain its external shape.
Fewer and fewer young religious people have proper knowledge of the great Jewish thinkers of the past and present. And even when they do, the ideas of these great thinkers are presented to them as information instead of as challenges to their own thinking or as prompts to the development of their own creativity. This is a mistake. Our current spiritual and intellectual challenges cannot be answered by simply looking backwards and giving answers that once worked but are now outdated.
Instead of new theories, hypotheses and great ideas, we get instant answers to questions of the greatest importance, offered via a variety of self-help books, which seem to claim that their philosophical information came directly from Sinai.
Trivial, simplistic, and often incorrect information displaces significant ideas. The information is merely “tweeted” – thus too brief and unsupported by proper arguments – yet still presented as “the answer.” By delivering “perfect” answers, everything is done to crush questioning.
The quest for certainty paralyses the search for meaning.
UNCERTAINTY IS the very stimulus that compells man to unfold his intellectual capacity. Every idea within Judaism is multifaceted and filled with contradictions, opposing opinions and unsolvable paradoxes. The greatness of the talmudic sages was that they shared with their students their own struggles and doubts, and their attempts at resolving them, as when Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai debated the essential, existential question of whether man should have been created or not (Eruvin 13b).
Those teachers made students privy to their own inner lives. In that way they made their discussions exciting. They created tension in their classes, waged war with their own ideas and asked their students to fight them with knives between their teeth. They were not interested in teaching dogmas, but instead asked their students to deconstruct them so as to rediscover the questions.
These teachers realized that not all paradoxes can be solved, because life itself is a paradox.
It is true that this approach is not without risk, but there is no authentic life choice that is risk-free. Nothing is worse than giving in to the indolence and callousness that stifles inquiry and leaves one drifting with the current.
Such an approach shrinks Judaism’s universe to a self-centered and self-satisfying ideological ghetto, robbing it of its most essential component: ongoing debate about the religious meaning of life, how to live in God’s presence and how to move toward higher levels.
Outreach programs, although well intended, have become institutions that, like factories, focus on mass production and believe that the more people they can draw into Jewish observance, the more successful they are. By doing so, they crush the minds of many newcomers who might have made major contributions to a new and a vigorous Judaism. The goal is to fit them into the existing system. To them, only numbers count.
Millions of dollars are spent to create more and more of the same type of standard religious Jew. We are not unlike the Tower of Babel generation, when the whole world was “of one language and of one speech.” We are producing a religious Jewish community of artificial conformism in which independent thought and difference of opinion is not only condemned, but its absence is considered to be the ultimate ideal.
In doing so we have created a generation of “yes men,” but we desperately need to heed Kierkegaard’s warning to Christianity: “The greatest proof of Christianity’s decay is the prodigiously large number of [like-minded] Christians” (M.M.
Thulstrup’s “Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Imitation” in A Kierkegaard Critique, H Johnson and N Thulstrup, eds., NY 1962).
The author is the dean of the David Cardozo Academy in Jerusalem, the author of many books on Judaism and an international lecturer.
Part Two
The great pillars of Judaism, the great value of spiritual, intellectual and moral dissent, have become anathema. Instead of teaching the art of audacity we are now educating a generation of kowtowers.
Insight has been replaced with clichés, flexibility with obstinacy and spontaneity with habit. There is social ostracism of any kind of healthy rebellion against the conventional.
Eliezer Berkovits was ignored when he argued that Halacha had become defensive; the great thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel is largely disregarded by Orthodoxy; Haredi yeshivot pay no attention to Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook. Above all, we see dishonest attempts to portray fundamentalism as a genuinely open-minded, intellectual position, whereas in truth it is nothing of the sort. Great visions of the past are misused and abused. Today we are seeing many people being told that they must imitate so as to belong to the religious camp. Spiritual plagiarism has been adopted as the appropriate way of religious life and thought.
Yes, there are still dissenters in Judaism today – and they are increasing in number. There are even some yeshivot and institutions that dissent, such as Yeshivat Otniel, Yeshivat Siach Yitzchak and the David Cardozo Academy’s Beit Midrash of Avraham Avinu. But the great tragedy is that while these places encourage courageous and independent thought, the vast majority of Orthodoxy ignores their voices.
Instead, the-powers-that-be put their weight behind the insipid and the trivial, and have fallen in love with the flatness of mainstream institutions, which deliver large numbers and offer instant answers to people who find themselves in religious crisis.
Original Jewish thinkers today fall victim to the glut of conformity. While these thinkers challenge conventional thinking, they remain unsupported and live lonely lives because our culture writes them off. It serves only the idol worship of intellectual and spiritual submission rather than saying yes to new religious ideas, which we desperately need.
MOST TALMUDIC scholars today do not realize that the authors whose opinions they teach would turn in their graves if they knew their opinions were being taught as dogmas that cannot be challenged. They wanted their ideas tested, discussed, thought through, reformulated and even rejected, with the understanding that no final conclusions have ever been reached, nor could they or should they be reached. They realized that matters of faith should remain fluid, not static.
Halacha is the practical upshot of unfinalized beliefs that remain in theological suspense. Only in this way can we prevent Judaism from either becoming a religion that is paralyzed in its awe of a rigid tradition, or evaporating into a utopian reverie.
TODAY’S JUDAISM desperately needs great critics to impassion and energize its important message. We need spiritual Einsteins, Freuds and Pasteurs to reveal Judaism’s untapped potential and yet-to-be developed grandeur. Judaism should be challenged by new Spinozas and Nietzsches; by remorseless atheists who would scare the hell out of our rabbis who would then be forced into thinking bold ideas.
Our thinking is behind the times, and that is something we can no longer afford. Judaism is about bold ideas. Its goal is not to find the truth, but to inspire us to honestly search for it. Torah study is not only the greatest privilege there is, but also the most dangerous, since it can so easily lead to self-satisfaction and spiritual conceit. The leashing of our souls is easier than the building of our spirit.
We must search for Judaism in its embryonic form, before it was solidified into the Halacha as we know it today. We have a desperate need to return to its great ideas with its many opinions and develop them in ways that can answer the many different spiritual needs of modern man and inspire his soul.
We should emulate Rembrandt, the great Dutch painter who, unlike all the other painters of his generation, used the raw material of Holland’s landscape to perceive hidden connections – linking his preternatural sensibility to a reality that he was able to transform, with great passion, into a new creation. He found himself in a state of permanent antagonism toward his society but today inspires us as never before.
In Judaism, too, one cannot inherit faith and one cannot receive the Jewish tradition. One must fight for the Torah and earn it. To be religious is to live in a state of warfare. The purpose of religion is to disturb. Judaism is a building that is still surrounded by scaffolding. That scaffolding should remain while the building continues.
We do not need revisionist, reform-like positions. History has shown that such approaches do not work and often lack the genuine religious experience. We should not be overanxious to encourage innovation in cases of doubtful improvement. And one does not discover new lands by losing sight of the shore from where one began one’s journey.
But the time has come to rethink Jewish education.
We are in need of yeshivot in which students are challenged about their beliefs; where they are confronted with Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers’ critiques on Judaism and learn how to respond.
Our young people must become aware that doubt, not certainty, leads to real education. We need yeshivot where religious authenticity rather than rabbinic authority reigns supreme, where teachers have the courage to share their doubts and where students have the freedom to learn that, just as in life, Judaism is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
There is an urgent need to set up “Tents of Avraham” throughout the land of Israel, where religious and nonreligious Jews can study, discuss and argue the great faith positions of earlier and later generations. Where they can engage in the wonder of Judaism and study its struggles, its worries and its constant search for new understandings of itself.
The result of those discussions could well be the discovery that some components now seen as fundamental to Judaism may have to be replaced. But the need to break idols and take down sacred cows is itself a Jewish task, one that the first Jew, Avraham, initiated. No doubt there will be fierce arguments, but we should never forget that great controversies are also great emancipators.
Sure, this is painful. But it is also liberating and refreshing. Without it, not only is there no future for Judaism; there is also no real purpose.
The writer is dean of the David Cardozo Academy in Jerusalem, the author of many books on Judaism and an international lecturer. For more information on this topic, the writer can be contacted at nlc@internet-zahav.net.
