God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (36 page)

Later in this saga the action narrows and intensifies, shifting from the interactions of God and all humanity to the interactions of God and a particular people. In perhaps the most fateful deal in the history of the world’s religions, God calls Abraham and his descendants to be His people and promises them a special land. To get there, however, they will have to wander, as will Moses, who after leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt will spend forty years in the wilderness hard by the Promised Land. The climax of this story comes on Mount Sinai when God delivers the Torah through Moses and by this new covenant offers a new way out of exile, a new path back home.

Like the term
dharma
in Indian religions,
Torah
is a wonderfully expansive term. Though typically translated as “law,” it actually connotes “teaching” or “guidance.” Torah refers in the first instance to the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Torah also means the entire Hebrew Bible, which Jews refer to not as the Old Testament but as the
Tanakh
, an acronym for its three parts: Torah (in the narrow sense of the five books of Moses),
Neviim
(“prophets” such as Isaiah and Amos), and
Ketuvim
(“writings,” including Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and Song of Songs). Torah refers more broadly to the oral law, the interpretive tradition said to have been revealed alongside the written law to Moses on Sinai and now written down in the core texts of the rabbinic tradition: the Mishnah (c. 200
C.E.
), the Jerusalem Talmud (fourth century
C.E.
), and the Babylonian Talmud (fifth century
C.E.
). Studying and debating the Tanakh and Talmud is Torah too. And according to a Jewish folk saying, “Even the conversation of Jews is Torah.”
¹

So this religion of memory is about both story and law. Jews are a people who remember who they are by telling these stories and by following this law. For them, law (
halakha
) and narrative (
aggadah
) are inseparable, two sides of the same coin. Anthropologist Mary Douglas once called the biblical book of Numbers “a law and story sandwich,” but the same can be said of Judaism itself.
²
Here the task of human life is not to achieve enlightenment or moksha but “to walk humbly with thy God” (Micah 6:8) and in so doing to repair the world (
tikkun olam
).
³
This redemption is thisworldly, accomplished not in heaven but here on earth. And it comes by doing rather than believing. It is by practicing the 613
mitzvot
(commandments) described in the Jewish scriptures that we bring holiness to our imperfect world. In this sense Judaism differs dramatically from Christianity, where faith is paramount. Whereas Christians strive to keep the faith, Jews strive to keep the commandments.

A few years ago, I asked an Orthodox rabbi (“teacher”) which of these two elements was more important in Judaism: telling the story or following the law? “I give you a Jewish answer,” he told me in his thick Brooklyn accent. “You can’t have one without the other. Those who forget the law eventually forget to tell the story.”

A Religion and a People

Judaism is both the least and the greatest of the great religions. Strictly by the numbers, it is by far the smallest. There are only about 14 million Jews worldwide, not much more than the population of Mumbai, India. The Jewish population in Israel, the sole country with a Jewish majority, is only about 4.9 million. More Jews—roughly 5.2 million—live in the United States, but no other country has a Jewish citizenry even approaching one million, and most people in the world have never met a Jew.

But this tiny religion has wielded influence far out of proportion to its numbers. It started a monotheistic revolution that remade the Western world. It gave us the prophetic voice, which continues to demand justice for the poor and oppressed (or else). It gave us stories that continue to animate political and literary conversations worldwide: Adam and Eve in the Garden, Noah and the Flood, David and Goliath. Its grand narrative of slavery and freedom, exile and return, may well be, with all due respect to Christian narratives of the Passion of Jesus and Hindu narratives of Rama and Sita, the greatest story ever told. Judaism also stands at the crossroads of today’s most vexing and volatile international conflict: the contest between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middle East that some conservative Christians at least believe will usher in the end of the world.

In the United States, Jews are influential in politics, thanks in part to high voter turnouts among Jews and their strong presence in key electoral college states such as New York, New Jersey, and Florida. Although the White House has not yet seen a Jewish president, Jews have occupied seats in the U.S. Congress and on the U.S. Supreme Court far out of proportion to their numbers in the broader population. The same is true of CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies.

Jews have made their deepest impression on American popular culture. Sandy Koufax, perhaps the greatest left-handed pitcher in baseball history, brought attention to Judaism when he refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers because it fell on the Jewish Day of Atonement known as Yom Kippur. Almost every major Hollywood studio was founded by Jews, as were NBC and CBS. Jews also made their mark on Broadway in musicals (George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim) and plays (Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein). Judaism gave the United States some of its most celebrated writers—from poet Allen Ginsberg to songwriter Bob Dylan to novelist Philip Roth—and some of its most celebrated buildings, thanks to architects Louis Kahn, Frank Gehry, and the master-plan architect for the new World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan Daniel Libeskind.

More than any other American art form, comedy has been shaped by Jewish performers. There is a long tradition of Jewish humor about the absurdities of life and the hypocrisies of the high and mighty (including God Himself). This tradition came to the United States via Ellis Island and was perfected in vaudeville, stand-up comedy, radio, and television. The history of American comedy is unimaginable without the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Mel Brooks, George Burns, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Jerry Lewis, Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, and Jon Stewart. In fact, by almost any accounting, Jews, who make up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, account for the vast majority of America’s working comics.

This outsized influence is by no means limited to the United States, however. Fourteen of
Time
magazine’s one hundred most important people of the twentieth century were Jewish, including film director Steven Spielberg, author Anne Frank, and person of the century Albert Einstein. Jews have done even better with the Nobel Prize, claiming nearly one-quarter of these honors since they were first awarded in 1901. Whenever anyone anywhere puts on a pair of Levi’s, sips a cappuccino from Starbucks, spends a night in a Hyatt, powers up a Dell computer, or performs a Google search, they have a Jewish entrepreneur to thank.

You would think all this would be enough work for any one religion. Yet Judaism also managed to give birth to Christianity and Islam. (Jesus was an observant Jew.) So while Judaism itself commands the allegiance of only two out of every thousand human beings, its offspring account for one out of every two.

Judaism also stands apart for being both a religion and a people. The word
religion
comes from both
relegere
, to recollect, and
religare
, to bind together.
⁴
And the Jewish people do both, binding themselves to one another and to God through stories, law, and other modes of recollection.

It is sometimes said that Judaism is about ethnicity as much as religion, but that is not quite right, since Jews come from all sorts of different ethnic groups. There are Ashkenazi Jews of German and Eastern European descent (by far the largest group), Sephardic Jews of Spanish and Arab descent, and Ethiopian Jews of African descent. Like Hindus, however, Jews do function as an ethnicity of sorts, bound together not so much by shared beliefs as by a shared sense of community. This solidarity is fostered by the observance of rituals and festivals that set Jews apart, but even the unobservant are still considered Jews. To say you are Jewish may mean that you believe in the God of Israel, attempt to follow His commandments, and study Torah. It may also mean that you come from a Jewish family. You can’t be both an atheist and a Muslim, but a large minority of Jews do not believe in God.

Arguing for the Sake of God

Given this diversity, it should not be surprising that Judaism isn’t easy to pin down. That there are as many Jewish opinions as there are Jews is a commonplace, but this estimate is understated. As an old adage goes, wherever you have two Jews there are always at least three opinions. No religion, of course, speaks with one voice. But Judaism is unusually cacophonous. More than any of the other great religions, its practitioners follow Rilke’s admonition to “love the questions.”
⁵
Only in Judaism is there a religious teacher principally famous for asking “Why?”
⁶

If you ever stumble on a traditional yeshiva, a Jewish school for the study of sacred texts, the first thing you will notice is the noise. Students study in pairs in a large hall, often with wild gesticulations and hardly ever in hushed tones. They read aloud from this story or that law, and they argue even louder about the meanings. The yeshiva demonstrates that learning is valued in Judaism and that disagreements are a path to learning. Perhaps most important, it demonstrates that Jews revel in a good debate.

When yeshiva students are arguing with their partners, they are trying to get at the truth. According to a Hasidic saying, “If you are proved right, you accomplish little; but if you are proved wrong, you gain much: you learn the truth.”
⁷
But these students do not necessarily assume that the truth is on one side or the other of their disputes, or even somewhere in between. The name
Israel
refers to one who has wrestled with God (Genesis 32:28), and for millennia Jews have done just that. They have also wrestled with one another (including the pious dead) and with their own tradition’s tensions between story and law, prophet and priest, exile and return, mercy and justice, movement and rest.

What is required in Judaism is not to agree, but to engage. According to Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, “If a Jew has no one to quarrel with, he quarrels with God, and we call it theology; or he quarrels with himself, and we call it psychology.”
⁸
It was a Jew, Albert Einstein, who proved via the theory of relativity that even scientific observations depend on your perspective. Another Jew, American philosopher Horace Kallen, coined the phrase
cultural pluralism
and with it the metaphor of civilization as an orchestra in which differences in religion, language, and art can enhance social harmony rather than undermining it.
⁹
In what might seem like the cacophony of yeshiva training, Jews hear a symphony.

Jews record the commandments of God in two major scriptures, each as multivocal as the yeshiva itself. The Tanakh is a sprawling anthology of diverse genres, voices, and sources spanning roughly a millennium. It begins with not one but two different stories of creation. In its twenty-four books (two of which—Ruth and Esther—are named after women) we hear of God and angels, kings and commoners. We encounter proverbs, prophecies, love poems, hymns, theological history, wisdom literature, law, and apocalyptic visions.

Judaism’s second major sacred text, the Talmud, is even more unruly. A vast tangle of various lines of argumentation, its two and a half million words don’t just contain contradictions; they are designed around them, with a passage at the center of each page literally surrounded by competing interpretations. “Turn the pages,” one rabbi says, “turn them well, for everything is in them.”
¹⁰
In one of the great intellectual contests of all time, two rabbis, Hillel and Shammai, joust in this anthology of arguments over three hundred different issues. Hillel, who has been described as “Judaism’s model human being,” almost always gets the upper hand, which is why the Jewish student center near my office is named Hillel House and not Shammai House.
¹¹
But the Talmud does not simply record Judaism according to Hillel. It records Shammai’s views too. So his words are also scripture. Or, as the Talmud reads in a passage that concluded three years of bitter debate between the School of Shammai and the School of Hillel, “Both are the words of the living God, but the law is in accordance with the view of the house of Hillel.”
¹²

Most human beings find ambiguity intolerable. Chasing after uncertainty and running away from contradictions, we squint when testing our eyes, determined to bring what is blurry into focus, as if our determination could make it so. Jews are trained not just to abide ambiguity but to glory in it. If, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “The well-bred contradict other people” while “the wise contradict themselves,” the Jewish scriptures are wisdom personified.
¹³

This wisdom echoes in the ways and means of the U.S. Supreme Court, which like the Talmud records dissenting opinions alongside majority decisions. It also lives on in a sixteenth-century text called the
Shulchan Aruch
(literally “Set Table”), the most authoritative collection of halakha (Jewish “law” or “way”) after the Talmud. The main text of the
Shulchan Aruch
is written by a Sephardic Jew from a Sephardic perspective, but the glosses, which serve as the “tablecloth” (
mappah
) to the “table” set by the Sephardim, are written by an Ashkenazi scholar. The rabbinic tradition also animates the life and legacy of Sigmund Freud, one of the great Jewish thinkers of all time, who built his discipline of psychoanalysis on the insight that there are competing voices not only among individuals but also inside them. One of psychotherapy’s tasks is to attend to these voices, and to find a way to live with the ambiguities and contradictions they conjure up.