HEY JEWS

your thoughts actually brush up against something i've been thinking about lately, which is... as a totally agnostic jew, is it possible to retain any of my jewish identity in any kind of good faith at all?

i almost have this all-or-nothing feeling, that is, if i were to believe any of it, then wouldn't it only make sense to believe/practice all of it? in any religious continuum, aren't the most devout/fundamentalist thinkers always going to, ultimately, win the argument?

it's the 21st century, identity is your playground and tribalism is getting redefined.

I'm a non-kosher, goyish-mother, non-synagogue-attending, non-god-believing, bacon-cheeseburger-eating Jew, but I'm a Jew dammit, and I defy anyone to take that away from me or deny me that part of myself and my cultural history.

sure but doesn't that make being jewish no different than being like, 'i'm a goth!'

i mean i'm actually totally like you... completely secular, and yet jewishness is always ~there~. im just trying to figure out what it means.

i used to feel that way, but there are so many agnostics + moderates in jewish history stretching all the way back to the beginning (practically) that there's a whole jewish tradition you can latch onto and feel rooted in authentic practice. i look a lot to ppl like shalom aleichem, spinoza, isaac bashevis singer, moses mendelssohn (bff's with Kant), even the lubavitcher rebbe who (this is controversial + maybe apocryphal) attended the Sorbon w/ Rav Solevetchik (iirc). so there's room to mediate + modulate + stuff, it's just that things for historical reasons (the massive immigration of chassidim from europe to the US following the Shoah) seem particularly dogmatic + strict atm. like either all or nothing. i think that Chabad's current form tho, where ppl at varying levels of practice can participate and do what feels comfortable without being ostracized, is going to be dominant mode in next 100 years, and i think it was dominant mode pre-1940, even in Europe. lots of those really religious looking Jews in the shtetl had various levels of observance, and 'Orthodoxy' as a term didn't exist until Reform + the haskalah began. before that you did what you did and you were a part of the greater community.

like, why can't u be a radical intellectual jew? or whatever kind of jew you want to be? it's not like wearing a big fur hat is more legitimate. it just feels more legitimate in 2012 bc they have developed a monopoly on 'authentic' religious practice. but it's not a historically or even intellectually valid monopoly.

good answer!

and yes the truth is i am way more comfortable identifying as jewish than i think i would be if i was from a different background (as hard as that is to imagine) because of the culture's history of dissent, debate, intellectual engagement.

sometimes i feel that a lot of that has been completely thrown out the window in the mainstream not-so-orthodox community, especially as pertains to israel, but what the hell.

this is a primary source anthology I read stuff from in one of my two Jewish studies classes in my first year of college; really fun and recommended

http://www.amazon.com/The-Jewish-1960s-American-Sourcebook/dp/1584654171

Nobody really knows what Reconstructionism is outside of the movement.

i was bar mitzvah'ed at a reconstructionist synagogue and neither i nor my mom have any idea what distinguishes it from conservative judaism aside from a vague commitment to "social justice" and thus a generally more lefty/crunchy congregation.

also i remember there being a few parody jew-rap albums in the late 80s. even back then i was too sophisticated to bother with them.

2 live jews

s1ocki, i'm also secular--i'm an athiest actually--but somehow i still feel very "jewish." i suppose it's because it feels good to imagine yourself part of a group.

i feel like i mentioned this on ilx recently, but there's a famous rumor about a particular pre-War Yeshiva where the students were all brilliant, but didn't have a lot of faith, and they'd hang out on Shabbos smoking cigars and learning Talmud.

search inside the amazon link above for "mashiah" and read one of the most wonderful things about the relevance of Jewish practice I've ever read.

ah yes 2 live jews. i guess that was early 90s rather than late 80s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at8hZpXyykM

that Waskow piece is really beautiful, silby!

Mordy, I would definitely read anything you wrote about Charedi pop music.

s1ocki, i'm also secular--i'm an athiest actually--but somehow i still feel very "jewish." i suppose it's because it feels good to imagine yourself part of a group.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, June 20, 2012 2:43 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i guess so? or maybe more like... a tradition? i dunno

an imagined tradition, for the most part. in my case. the elements of jewish tradition that were consciously passed down to me in ritualized fashion are useless to me.

in that case then you might as well say an imagined group as well, i don't think i really share more in common with your average jew than your average other person in my city/class/constellation of interests

I'm at a level of engagement and observance (and I could detail exactly what that entails) that is comfortable for me

I am interested in the details of what that entails!

i used to feel that way, but there are so many agnostics + moderates in jewish history stretching all the way back to the beginning (practically) that there's a whole jewish tradition you can latch onto and feel rooted in authentic practice.

^^^

totally agree with this, and reflects my own engagement with my cultural heritage as a Jew. I haven't been to synagogue since my rabbi died (altho I would probably go to one if I could find a decent one to join in SF). I go to seders and light the candles on Hannukah and um get drunk on Purim ... otherwise I feel like a lot of my "Jewishness" is bound up in the things I read (recently read an abridged version of Maimonides "Guide for the Perplexed, for ex.) and, to a certain extent, the way I think about cosmology and the structure of reality and other sort of high-falutin abstractions. I get very testy about the argument that all grounds of authenticity must be ceded to the most fundamentalist branches of a tradition, it's just not borne out historically, and that goes for other traditions besides Judaism as well.

i dunno

i think if you have a science-informed, reason-based view of the world, i'm not sure what the difference is in believing in some religious practice/theology and not others

science can't address everything

anything made-up can address anything, it doesnt mean its right or reasonable to believe in it

well I'm not really gonna argue that Jewish theology/cosmology is somehow superior or more accurate or more believable than others - I just find it helpful in framing my own ideas. there's stuff in there that makes sense to me, it's a point of view I'm comfortable with.

I guess to some extent a fair amount of it comes down to simple tribalism - I can find value in and have been fascinated by stuff in Buddhism, sufiism, the tarot/magick whatever, but I wasn't raised in those traditions, they don't feel like they're *mine* in the sense that I grew up learning about them and thinking about them with my family and peers.

i'll argue that Jewish theology/cosmology is much more appealing to me aesthetically, emotively and intellectually than other theological practices i've investigated. particularly kabbalistic/gnostic/chassidic theologies are incredibly dense + satisfying to study + meditate upon. i could probably talk about this for hours and hours tbh to get into why i find it so satisfying. i think it's just very well developed philosophically, as a kinda of parallel intellectual practice to trad continental or medieval phil or whatever.

i don't think it's so controversial to say that parts of jewish intellectual tradition are probably the most cerebrally developed theologies in world? not that it makes them better or anything, but it might make them more compelling for certain kinds of ppl...

def the case for me

I remember getting into an debate with a christian kid in elementary school where I was basically arguing, in less sophisticated terms, that Judaism didn't assert a truth claim in the same sense that Christianity did, that it wasn't presenting its answers as *the* answers, and also that Jewish traditions were just What We Do as opposed to the "right" way of doing things. I think I benefitted a lot from being raise with that frame of mind, as opposed to one in which a religion is exclusive of all others (we're right, they're wrong).

think that goes back to s1ocki's point about Judaism's "history of dissent, debate, intellectual engagement" - that's a real thing, and it isn't necessarily present in other traditions where you are just supposed to shut up and accept things on faith or because an authority figure told you so.

re jewish theological texts, this is one of my favorites of all time:
http://www.chabad.org/library/tanya/tanya_cdo/aid/6237/jewish/Lessons-in-Tanya.htm

it is generally considered to be one of the more accessible + broad treatments of chassidic philosophy. some parts are still incredibly complex systemic treatments of divinity, creation, revelation, progression of worlds, development of human consciousness, etc, that require a lot of time and background to fully tease out. and it's supposed to be a text written for lay people! once you get into more complex + esoteric works you could spend your entire life trying to understand them (and some scholars, like wolfson at nyu, moshe idel at hebrew u, boyarin sometimes do just that)

esoteric judaism - the math rock of theologies

i don't think it's so controversial to say that parts of jewish intellectual tradition are probably the most cerebrally developed theologies in world? not that it makes them better or anything, but it might make them more compelling for certain kinds of ppl...

― Mordy, Friday, June 22, 2012 12:15 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this true though? more than the catholic church's centuries of scholarship and theology? more than hinduism?

there's definitely a skeptical, questioning element to jewish theology that i appreciate—although i don't know if that, in practice, leads to any greater freedom of thought than any other religion.

I dunno if freedom of the thought is the end-goal. intellectual rigor is its own reward.

i would say that depends on what you apply it towards

like honestly i think the world be better served if great minds had been focused for centuries on stuff like how people get sick than transubstantiation and biblical property laws

re: the catholic church - frankly a lot of their theological/intellectual tradition reads like bending-over-backwards to invent arguments to justify dogma (not all, by any means, but a fair amount). Like, a lot of it strikes me as really tortured logic in the service of justifying something demonstrably ridiculous like a literal virgin birth or resurrection.

xp

like honestly i think the world be better served if great minds had been focused for centuries on stuff like how people get sick than transubstantiation and biblical property laws

you mean like keeping kosher to avoid trichinosis lol

re: the catholic church - frankly a lot of their theological/intellectual tradition reads like bending-over-backwards to invent arguments to justify dogma (not all, by any means, but a fair amount). Like, a lot of it strikes me as really tortured logic in the service of justifying something demonstrably ridiculous like a literal virgin birth or resurrection.

xp

― a dense custard of infinity (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, June 22, 2012 12:40 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i agree—but there were plenty of great catholic thinkers.

is this true though? more than the catholic church's centuries of scholarship and theology? more than hinduism?

yeah, i think this is true. afaik there is not a comparable collection of scholarship, liturgy + theology in any other religion, tho i'd be interested to hear about other possibilities.

i could be wrong about this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_theology

seems like these dudes thought about this stuff a lot

yeah not sure where you're goin with this Mordy

I mean Hinduism's been around longer, all those vedas...

it's kinda silly comparing different textual canons. i was really just trying to demonstrate that there is a huge disciplinary history that can be fulfilling to study regardless of questions of veracity. i feel like one of the major critiques of religion in the contemporary secular community is that it is intellectually vapid, and certainly tons of religious practice is vapid. but esp in judaism there is a large intellectual component undergirding it. just the legal + talmudic corpuses alone span thousands and thousands of volumes without even getting into theology or esoteric works.

yeah that's true, but I'm not sure the same can't be said for Hinduism and (especially) Islam