God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (40 page)

Zionism and the Holocaust

Another Jewish impulse, Zionism (from Mount Zion, near Jerusalem), cuts across these movements. As nationalism overtook Europe in the nineteenth century, some Jews started to rethink their narrative of exile and return in more explicitly political terms. Jews had endured over the centuries a series of persecutions and indignities—from Egypt to Babylon to murder at the hands of Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099 to their expulsion from Spain in 1492 to the anti-Semitic tirades of the Protestant leader Martin Luther’s
On the Jews and Their Lies
in 1543. The nineteenth century brought on a series of anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and elsewhere, prompting a political push for a Jewish homeland, typically dated to the First Zionist Congress of 1897. There was some discussion of establishing a Jewish state outside of the Middle East, including in Argentina or modern-day Uganda, but advocates finally fixed on the biblical Promised Land.

The key figure in early Zionism was Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), a Viennese Jew whose secular arguments for a Jewish state proceeded on pragmatic and political terms. Many Orthodox Jews initially opposed Zionism, arguing that creating a Jewish state was the job of God and his messiah alone. Many Reform Jews joined the opposition because they wanted to engage fully in the lives of their respective countries, not separate themselves from their fellow citizens. The Holocaust proved to be the tipping point for the Zionist cause. Tapping into centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, including the claim that Jews were “Christ killers,” Adolf Hitler and the Nazis killed six million Jews, roughly one-third of the Jewish population worldwide. Not long after the world learned of these horrors, the state of Israel was created, in 1948.

Feminist Theology

Judaism has also produced a vibrant conversation about the role of women in the Jewish community. Traditionally, Judaism has been the epitome of patriarchal religion. The biblical covenants were made with men and passed down through male circumcision. The minyan (quorum) required for certain religious activities has traditionally required ten male adults. Women were also exempted from the rabbinate and from many commandments. No wonder Jewish men have traditionally thanked God for three blessings: that they are not Gentiles, slaves, or women.

All this is changing, at least in non-Orthodox circles. Women joined the ranks of the rabbinate when Regina Jones of East Berlin was ordained in 1935. In the United States, Reform Jews ordained their first female rabbi in 1972, and Reconstructionist and Conservative Jews followed suit in 1974 and 1985, respectively. Even the Orthodox are loosening up. In Israel today Orthodox women are gradually breaking into the male monopoly of overseeing the certification of kosher food processing businesses. More important, Modern Orthodox women are now engaging in advanced Torah study, traditionally a central aspect of Jewish life.

Feminist theologians have done their best to retrieve examples of Jewish female leadership: Deborah the judge, prophet, and military leader described in the book of Judges; the Hasidic adept Oudil; and Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir. These theologians speak of God in both the feminine and the masculine and invoke the memory not only of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but also of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. But there is no pretending away the patriarchal history of Judaism. The term “texts of terror” now used to describe passages in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures that condone violence, referred originally to texts in the Tanakh describing murder, rape, and other violence against women.
³⁹
The Talmudic preference for males over females begins at birth. Or, as the Talmud puts it, “Happy is he whose children are sons and woe to him whose children are daughters.”
⁴⁰

Kabbalah

Each of the great religions does certain things well and other things poorly. Buddhism is strong on the experiential dimension of religion and weak on the ethical dimension. Judaism is just the opposite. Because of their community focus, Jews (with the notable exception of the Hasidim) have not cultivated personal spirituality with the care or intensity that Buddhists have. Recently, many Jews hungry for spiritual experience have gravitated toward various forms of Buddhist meditation. “Ju-Bus,” as they are called, are attracted not only to the experiences these contemplative practices offer but also to the fact that they are delivered inside a tradition that does not have a jealous god. This same hunger for spirituality is also driving many Jews to tap into their own religion’s experiential resources, including the mystical tradition known as Kabbalah.

A few years ago I was peppering a Jewish friend with questions about Judaism, and she was answering them patiently. After a while she blurted out, “You know I’m not Jewish, right?” This friend is one of the most Jewish people I know. Her mother is Jewish, her father is a rabbi, and her brother lives in Israel. She spent years studying Torah. She observes the commandments. She knows the blessings. And she embodies much of the best of the Jewish tradition. So why did she deny she is Jewish? Well, she was not really denying it. What she was telling me is that her experience of what we call God is bigger and more mysterious than anything the term
Judaism
might convey.

My friend is a mystic, though she would resist being put in that box too. But she has had experiences of God that most of the rest of us can only imagine, and she understands the Jewish tradition largely in light of Kabbalah. Because of the difficulties and dangers of this esoteric path, Kabbalistic study has traditionally been limited to married men advanced in both age and Torah study. Kabbalah had considerable influence in the medieval and early modern periods, but fell into decline during the reason-besotted Enlightenment. In recent years, Kabbalah has come into public view (and ridicule) because of the association of celebrities such as Madonna, David Beckham, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears with the Kabbalah Centre run in Los Angeles by Philip Berg. Kabbalah’s roots, however, run much deeper than this pop Kabbalism. In fact, they run to thirteenth-century Spain and an Aramaic book called the
Zohar
. This sprawling text of many volumes is traditionally attributed to a second-century figure named Shimon bar Yochai, though the faithful claim that its traditions go back to Moses and Sinai and even to creation itself. Scholars say the
Zohar
was likely written by the man who claimed only to have “discovered” it: Moses de Leon (1250–1305) of Avila, Spain.

Kabbalism contains all sorts of esoteric speculation not only on God but also on numbers, letters, vowels, and consonants. Ultimately, God is said to be
Ein Sof
, which is to say endless and limitless and beyond mental grasping. But Ein Sof manifests in ten
sefirot
, or emanations—a view opponents say pushes Kabbalah perilously close to polytheism. Another key concept in Kabbalah is
Shekhina
, the feminine and immanent aspect of God, which according to Kabbalists complements and balances the more masculine and transcendent aspect of God emphasized in the Tanakh and Talmud. The Shekhina makes an appearance in the Talmud, where she is said to go into exile in Babylon with the Jewish people. In Kabbalah, however, she takes center stage.

According to Kabbalistic thought, before creation all was one. But with creation came multiplicity. In a sort of spiritual Big Bang, everything exploded out into the cosmos in fragments but with a spark of the divine tucked inside each. So creation is a broken but redeemable vessel. Our job is to reverse this primordial exile of the many from the One, to return the sparks inside us and inside everything around us to their original wholeness. This is accomplished by doing the commandments, which bring one closer to God and to the rest of the Jewish community. But mitzvot also operate on another plane, by helping to lure the Shekhina out of her own exile and back into union with the more masculine aspect of the divine. Kabbalists speak of this union as a marriage of God and the people of Israel, where the Shekhina plays the role of God’s people in exile returning to their/her true home and repairing the world in the process.

Jewish Renewal

Judaism is often thought of as a closed community, and there are some for whom separation from the rest of the world is essential to Jewish life. A new movement, however, is eagerly adopting all sorts of outside influences into the Jewish family and giving them Jewish life. Jewish Renewal draws heavily on Kabbalah and Hasidism, but it was born with the counterculture in the 1960s, so from the start it was culturally and spiritually promiscuous, picking up this from feminism and environmentalism and that from Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. One early inspiration was Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (b. 1924), a Polish-born Orthodox rabbi and Holocaust survivor who taught for a time at the Buddhist-based Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and whose journey to India to meet the Dalai Lama was chronicled in Rodger Kamenetz’s
The Jew in the Lotus
(1994). A key early expression was
The Jewish Catalog
(1973), a “do-it-yourself kit” for creative Jewish spirituality modeled after
The Whole Earth Catalog
(1968). This man and this book both aimed to launch Judaism from insularity to openness—to a more experimental and embodied spirituality that would embrace not only the outside world but also other religious traditions.

Rather than founding new synagogues and positioning themselves as a new denomination, advocates of Jewish Renewal organize themselves into
havurot
(“fellowships”), small communities of equals gathered for prayer, Torah study, and meditation. Jews have long seen study as worship; in Jewish renewal, study is meditation too. The term
havurah
carries the connotation of “friend,” so these are fellowships of friends that actually share certain features with meetings of the Society of Friends (Quakers), including informal worship, casual dress, and an egalitarian spirit uncomfortable with hierarchy of any sort.

Practitioners of Jewish Renewal have been organized since 1993 into the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, but the spirit of this movement is better expressed in books such as Schachter-Shalomi’s
Jewish with Feeling
(2005) and Michael Lerner’s
Jewish Renewal
(1994). Many American synagogues today have havurot inside them, providing a place for Jews with inclinations toward yoga or Sufism or Kabbalah under the sacred canopy of the synagogue itself. Although many advocates of Jewish Renewal speak easily of the Shekhina, the marriage they believe will renew the world is between Judaism and other spiritualities.

To critics, Jewish Renewal is “New Age Judaism,” which is to say it isn’t really Jewish at all. Just as Humanistic Judaism has gone over the deep end into agnosticism and even atheism, Jewish Renewal is missing the re-. Did not God Himself say, “[I] have set you apart from the peoples, that ye should be Mine” (Leviticus 20:26)? If so, who are we to transgress the boundaries of religions? Such criticisms neglect to remember how malleable the Jewish tradition has been over the millennia and how central this malleability has been to its survival. The notion of an unadulterated Judaism is as elusive as the notion of an unchanging Buddhism. Hasidism, for example, makes all sorts of claims to tradition, but it is a product of the eighteenth century, older than Protestant fundamentalism, no doubt, but no less a modern invention. The same is true of Orthodoxy, which was born in nineteenth-century Germany in response to Reform Judaism. The Jewish tradition has always been a dance, or perhaps a wrestle, between the old and the new. And it is this give and take that keeps it vital.

While Judaism is a tradition of story and law, what has kept it alive is conversation and controversy—the inquisitive spirit of the boys (and, nowadays, girls) in the yeshiva. How to tell the story? How to interpret the law? How to end the exile? Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God’s behalf. This “blasphemy of certainty” is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.
⁴¹
Jews, both religious and secular, have done all these things, of course. Yet their tradition warns them repeatedly that their thoughts are not God’s thoughts, reminding Hillel that Shammai might be right about this and reminding Shammai that Hillel might be right about that. Because only God really knows, the rest of us are free to wrestle, without fear, with how to read a text or how to observe a commandment—to turn learning into recreation and debate into play. If religion without controversy is dead, Judaism may well be the liveliest of the great religions.

Chapter Eight
Daoism

The Way of Flourishing

Modern life is purpose-driven. Though much of it is conducted in an office chair, it is nonetheless about speed and efficiency—“galloping by sitting.”
¹
Wandering, by contrast, is slow, unproductive, and open to surprises. If you have a destination, or even a plan, you aren’t on a wander. Purposeless by design, wandering is closer to play than to work. It lets circumstance and desire take you where they will, and it doesn’t sweat the outcome.

The Western monotheisms portray wandering as punishment—something you get after you bite the apple (Adam and Eve) or kill your brother (Cain). In Daoism (or Taoism
²
), however, wandering is opportunity rather than punishment. The Daoist hero Lu Dongbin was working his way toward marriage, employment, and success when, during a nap, he caught a glimpse of the future prison he was making for himself. He dreamed he was a rich and respected government official with many children and grandchildren until a scandal stole everything from him, scattering his family and leaving him a broken man. When he woke up, Lu decided to climb out of his hamster cage. After flunking China’s imperial examinations, he made for the mountains instead. Eventually this dropout became one of Daoism’s beloved Eight Immortals.