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PDF FormatUnderlying the conflict over politics in Israel is an essential conflict of perceptions—a conflict over how to grasp the world we live in, whether through the prism of the sacred, or that of the secular.
These are the two categories into which we divide society, and each is identified with a set of principles, taken to be axiomatic. There are political and social opinions which are held to be naturally secular, and there are opinions which are held to be naturally religious. But these often emerge as caricatures rather than as reflections of authentic secular or religious philosophy.
Because we live in a world of sound bItes, real reflection is often overwhelmed by the pressing needs, struggles and anxieties of the day-to-day. This allows the easy-to-digest, “fast food” caricatures of religiosity and secularism to become that to which the community relates and understands as true. These simplistic images are not a little bit distorting, and perhaps dangerous as well, and they require examination if we are to forge a shared cultural language—that is, a common spiritual vocabulary that can serve to unite the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews. The vocabulary which we seek can be extracted from the expressions and rhythms of contemporary life. What hinders the creation of this language, at least in part, is the mutual distortion and caricaturing which prevent the religious and secular communities from truly communicating with one another.
Not infrequently, denigrating expressions of anti-religious sentiment in the media arise from a severely distorted perception of the intellectual and existential reality of religious thought. Clearly, some of this distortion is self-serving, and self-justifying. It comforts Jews who have long since abandoned any sense of deep Jewish content and identity in their lives, allowing them to feel justified, morally correct and even superior in their choices.
However, much of the misperception of religious life emerges from distortion generated by the religious community itself, specifically by voices which misinterpret, distort and project an image of religion which is unfaithful to the sources and the spirit of classical Judaic tradition. Even when this strain of religious belief does ground itself in sources, it is done in a non-dialectical fashion: One source or a group of sources is cited from a particular time and place, and held to express the essence of Jewish thought; other sources from other times and other places which may express very different views are conveniently ignored.
In the discussion below, I have chosen to treat a single, highly charged example of this phenomenon of distortion which comes from non-dialectic use of our sources: The question of man’s right to challenge religious principles, which in its most developed form is the right to challenge even God, his activity, conduct and involvement in the world. My analysis will revolve around possible human responses to suffering and evil, and particularly the relationship between those whose response to evil is to question, and those whose response is to offer theological explanations. It is my hope that this effort will succeed in redefining at least this first basic religious issue in a way that reflects a truer spirit of classic Jewish sources. This is the first step in forming a shared spiritual language which has the ability to unite the majority of the Jewish people under the umbrella of the sacred.
II
The classic understanding—or rather, misunderstanding—of the relationship between questions and answers in religious life is perhaps best expressed in the old adage, “For the believer, no proof is necessary; for the non-believer, no proof will suffice.” The suggested relationship of questions to answers is similarly expressed in the Israeli vernacular by the not accidental terms hazara bitshuva (“return in answer”) and hazara bish’ela (“return in question”). In Hebrew idiom, one who returns with “the answer” is one who decides to take up observance of the commandments, to move from the periphery to the center, to become God-involved, to become a religious personality. One who returns with “the question” is understood to be someone who moves from a theocentric world to an anthropocentric world, from living in a religious reality to existing and functioning in a secular reality.
The use of “the question” to express movement away from religiosity towards secularism is obviously not an accidental turn of phrase. Language, and particularly popular idiomatic expression, captures the essence of the thought and rhythms of a society. The mistaken implication is that to question is to move away from a religious mode of thinking and living. To have unwavering answers, on the other hand, is viewed as the epitome of the religious position. Yet on consideration, it becomes apparent that this understanding of the relationship between questions and answers is a caricature of religious truth, and a distortion of the Jewish sources. Indeed, the popular usage of these terms tells the story of a very profound mistake, and one which exerts a powerful negative influence on the possibility of dialogue and shared community in modern Israel.
III
Let us begin with a question: If the return to Judaism in its classic sense in fact means the return to a deeper, richer, more fulfilling lifestyle, why doesn’t everyone do it?
When I was seventeen or eighteen years old, looking around the world in which my friends and I would one day teach, we thought it was so simple. It was obvious to us that we would be able to find the words, that synthesis of meaning and excitement that would prove irresistible to the secular Jew, and we believed that it was only a matter of time until everyone was engaged in religious practice, observance and study. We have been teaching now for over fifteen years and, somehow, it has not happened. The overwhelming majority of the Jewish people have not returned in answer. Why?
Clearly there is not one simple monolithic answer. Part of the explanation is probably the hedonism of the modern world, which can unquestionably drown out the quiet murmur of the sacred, at least for a while.
But I do not believe this answer exhausts the question. There is something deeper. There is another level of resistance to the message of “return” which prevents at least a significant segment of our people from considering coming back to their roots. The first reason assumes that the listener cannot hear the still, small voice of holiness above the din of modern materialism; the message is fine, the reception is unclear because of static. But the second, deeper approach will suggest that perhaps the flaw lies within the message itself.
R. Abraham Isaac Kook, in his magnum opus Orot Hakodesh, suggests that the people of Israel are themselves “a received tradition of Moses from Sinai.”1 In other words, the Jewish people are by their very existence, a prism of revelation. Refracted through the collective consciousness and unconsciousness of the Jewish people are the rays of authentic spirituality and divine revelation: “Every spark of scattered life, through all the dimensions and currents of Jewish being is somehow connected to the source of divine spirit. Every movement in the symphony of Jewish thinking and feeling, no matter how far or how distant it seems to be, is in some sense an expression of the supernatural light within the Jewish spirit. Non-authentic spiritual movement finds no enduring home in the community of Israel.”2
One corollary which one finds in R. Kook’s writing is the idea that the community has a built-in barometer for spiritual truth, a built-in litmus test which detects authenticity in spiritual teaching. And from this, one could, perhaps somewhat audaciously, offer the following thesis: If the community is unable to hear the message of a “return in answer,” then the problem may not be with the community: Perhaps the message itself is fundamentally flawed. It could well be that the Jewish people reject the contemporary call for religious return because of their inherent spiritual instinct. The intuitive spiritual barometer of the community senses a violation of its basic ethos in the Jewish teaching in its present form.
This violation is, I believe, related to the essence of the language of hazara bitshuva and hazara bish’ela. It is related to the very implication that if one but returns to God and to religious observance, one will be in a place which supplies answers—all the answers—a place which is beyond the place of sh’ela, the place of question. Intuitively, the community understands that this is not true, that questioning is a religious category, perhaps even a religious imperative, and that “returning in question” can, contrary to what has been said so often, be a profoundly religious act: It can be a movement not away from God, but towards God.
